Despatches Winter 2012

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SAVING LIVES: FRONTLINE MEDICINE IN A CENTURY OF CONFLICT

Despatches

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Support us and enjoy an exclusive pass to all five branches By joining IWM Friends you are giving invaluable support to a range of projects that will help future generations to understand the causes, course and consequences of war. In return you can enjoy: Unlimited free entry to IWM London paying exhibitions including Cecil Beaton: Theatre of War opening on 6 September 2012 Free entry to IWM Duxford* Unlimited free entry to Churchill War Rooms Unlimited free entry to HMS Belfast Despatches, the Friends magazine, delivered direct to your door Exclusive Friends events

To join or to purchase a gift membership please call us on 020 7416 5255 or visit iwm.org.uk/friends *except special events and airshow days at IWM Duxford Discounts and free admission are at the discretion of IWM and IWM Trading Company

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Despatches FKD 534

Number 15, Winter 2012

Left: A casualty from HMS Sheffield is rushed by stretcher to the sick bay on board HMS Hermes during the Falklands War, 1982.

Cover picture: Medics of a Medical Emergency Response Team (MERT) take a casualty on board their Chinook helicopter for evacuation to the field hospital at Camp Bastion, Afghanistan, 2007.

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Comment David Long, Chairman IWM Friends IWM Friends News Special Offers Friends Events Portraits from the ‘People’s War’ Claire Brenard takes a closer look at a new Second World War art exhibition Saving Lives: Frontline medicine in a century of conflict Matthew Brosnan on a new exhibition at IWM North Journey to rehabilitation Ian Forsyth visits Headley Court medical centre War Story’s new acquisition Amanda Mason on the latest addition to War Story: Serving in Afghanistan IWM: Museum on the move Sarah Henning and Gill Smith look at the history of IWM relocations

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Acquisitions Anthony Richards on Max Plowman’s letter of resignation Reconciliation in a war zone Reverend Canon Andrew White describes reconciliation work in Iraq What’s On The Paralympic games Alison Baskerville on photographing London’s 2012 Paralympics IWM News The theatre of war Mark Lawson on war and theatre The story behind the picture Hilary Roberts on one of the Battle of El Alamein’s most well-known images Books Shop And Finally Jonathan Dimbleby on IWM London’s help for his new book Winter 2012 Despatches n 3

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Comment

David Long, Chairman IWM Friends

This year we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the foundation of the Friends. As many of you will know it was founded by Dame Felicity Peake, the first Director of the WAAF. When she retired from IWM’s Board of Trustees in 1985, after 23 years of service, Dame Felicity was asked by the former Director-General Dr Alan Borg to set up the Friends of the Imperial War Museum. A Council of Management was formed and the objectives of the charity – principally ‘to advance the education of the public by rendering support to the Imperial War Museum’ – were established.

The support which you give as a Friend has enabled us to achieve a great deal in our first quarter of a century. Since our foundation we have donated almost £400,000 to IWM to support a range of projects and activities across its five branches including Airspace at IWM Duxford, the restoration of the film The Battle of the Somme, a TimeStack exhibit at IWM North, Education Rooms at Churchill War Rooms, and the new entrance at HMS Belfast.

Since I became Chairman of IWM Friends in 2002 I am proud to see how the Society is flourishing again. We have held special events such as our 20th anniversary party in 2007, a series of debates, and a one-day military history conference; launched a membership desk at IWM London, operated by a dedicated team of volunteers; improved our Friends logo and leaflets; and through the establishment of an Editorial Committee have continued to improve both the design and content of Despatches. We now have over 5,000 members, many of whom take an active role in attending our events or generously giving their time to volunteer, for which we are most grateful.

We are entering a particularly exciting time in IWM’s history as it prepares to take the lead role in the international commemorations for the centenary of the start of the First World War. The centenary presents IWM with a unique opportunity to develop its First World War Galleries and Large Exhibits Gallery at IWM London to help future generations to understand the causes, course and consequences of that conflict. To do this IWM London will need to close for six months from 2 January 2013, but the usefulness of the building will be greatly improved and expanded.

I am delighted that the Friends are supporting this important project. Last year we gave £50,000 to the Your Country Needs You display in the new Galleries, which will examine Earl Kitchener’s recruitment campaign across Great Britain and its Empire and will show why millions of people were driven to support the war effort in many different ways. You can read more about the content of the display on page seven. Over the next three years we hope to raise a further £200,000 to meet the full cost of the display. If we can do so, it will be a remarkable achievement.

Lambeth Road, London, SE1 6HZ Registered Charity No. 294360 Telephone: 020 7416 5255 Email: friends@iwm.org.uk Website: www.iwm.org.uk/friends Honorary Members His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales His Royal Highness The Duke of Cambridge His Royal Highness Prince Henry of Wales His Royal Highness The Duke of York Patrons The Rt Hon the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury The Archbishop of Westminster The Chief Rabbi His Excellency the Secretary-General for the Commonwealth His Excellency the High Commissioner for Australia His Excellency the High Commissioner for Canada His Excellency the High Commissioner for India His Excellency the High Commissioner for New Zealand His Excellency the High Commissioner for Pakistan Her Excellency the High Commissioner for South Africa His Excellency the High Commissioner for Sri Lanka General Sir Peter de la Billière KCB KBE DSO MC and Bar DL Dr Alan Borg CBE FSA Sir Robert Crawford CBE Dr Noble Frankland CB CBE DFC The Rt.Hon The Countess Mountbatten of Burma CBE CD JP DL Sir Harold Walker KCMG President: Field Marshal Sir John Chapple GCB CBE Vice President: Sara Jones, CBE, DL Friends Council Members Chairman: David Long Major General David Burden CB CVO CBE Emma Burrows Tony Hine (co-opted) Diane Lees FMA FRSA Donough O’Brien Professor Paul O’Prey Foster Summerson Marina Vaizey CBE Margaret Watson Head of the Friends: Victoria Thompson Membership Services Manager: Laura Whitman Founder: Air Commodore Dame Felicity Peake, DBE, AE Editorial Committee Chairman: Marina Vaizey CBE Lindsay Ball Elizabeth Bowers David Long Emily MacArthur Laura McKechan Amanda Mason Professor Paul O’Prey Hilary Roberts Victoria Thompson Kieran Whitworth Despatches Editor: Victoria Thompson 020 7416 5372 Design: Smith+Bell www.smithplusbell.com Advertising and Print: George Young 020 7861 3915 To request additional copies or back issues call 020 7416 5372

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26th Annual General Meeting The 26th Annual General Meeting of the Friends of the Imperial War Museum will be held on Tuesday 20 November 2012 at the Churchill War Rooms at 5pm.

Tony Hine, who was coopted onto the Council in September 2011 as Honorary Treasurer, will stand for election. He qualified as a

chartered accountant in 1975 and has worked in private practice for the last 40 years. In recent years Tony has specialised in the provision of accountancy, secretarial and advisory services to flat management companies and residents’ associations. Tony lives in Essex, near Bishops Stortford, and he and his wife, Janet, have been Friends since 2006. He has an active interest in history and is an amateur actor in his spare time.

After the AGM Jonathan Dimbleby will give a talk on the Battle of El Alamein.

Business plan The Friends Council has approved a business plan, drafted by David Burden and Victoria Thompson, outlining our plans for the next three years. Central to the business plan is the need to increase membership in order to give greater support to IWM. The main focus will be on converting more of the visitors to the London branches into members and there are plans to use volunteers to promote membership at both the Churchill War Rooms and HMS Belfast. We ask for your help in recruiting new members by encouraging anyone who you think may be interested in joining the Friends to do so.

Over the next three years we hope to increase the surplus income from our events by ensuring that we have an attractive programme which will be popular; developing our pages on the IWM website so that we can offer visitors and Friends the opportunity to 6 n Despatches Winter 2012

purchase and renew membership online; encouraging more Friends to pay by Direct Debit to save time and administrative costs; and continuing to improve the standard of Despatches. In this digital age it is also important to develop our presence through social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to help attract new audiences.

In terms of governance, it is vital that we conduct a regular skills audit of Council members and recruit new members in the areas where there are skills shortages.

One of our major initiatives during the next three years is our fundraising campaign for the Your Country Needs You display in IWM London’s new First World War Galleries which we hope that Friends will support.

TOM MILLER

IWM FRIENDS NEWS

Professor Sir David Cannadine.

Friends President We are sorry to announce that our President, Field Marshal Sir John Chapple, will retire at the end of the year. Sir John has made a valuable contribution to our Society since he was appointed in 2008. His support has been unwavering – he has attended, and indeed presided over, many of our events, in particular our debate on Who was the Greatest General? in 2009 which he chaired, employing wit and humour.

He has also played an active role in our quarterly Council meetings.

Sir John will be succeeded by Professor Sir David Cannadine.

Sir David was educated at Clare College, Cambridge; St John’s College, Oxford; and at Princeton University. He began his academic career in 1977, becoming a fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge.

From 1988 Sir David spent ten years in New York as professor of history at Columbia University before returning to the UK to take up the post of Director of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London. He was appointed Whitney J Oates

Senior Research Scholar at Princeton University in 2008.

His publications include The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (1990), Class in Britain (1998), Ornamentalism: how the British saw their Empire (2001) and biographies of G.M.Trevelyan (1992) and Andrew W. Mellon (2006).

Among many wider responsibilities, Sir David is Chairman of the Blue Plaques Panel, Chairman of the Westminster Abbey Committee and a member of the Royal Mint Advisory Committee. He has been one of the judges of the Wolfson History Prizes since 2001. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and was knighted in the 2009 New Year Honours for services to scholarship.

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IWM FRIENDS NEWS Your Country Needs You Update In the last issue we outlined the plans for the Your Country Needs You display in the new First World War Galleries, for which we hope, with your help, to raise £250,000 by 2014.

Each issue of Despatches between now and Summer 2014 will include an update, both on the display and on our fundraising campaign.

Your Country Needs You will explore the recruitment campaign in both Great Britain and the Empire and will look at how those who stayed at home did what they could to help and support their country. It will comprise three sections – recruitment, the practicalities of becoming a soldier, and efforts on the home front.

The first section will look at what drove millions of men to answer the call for a mass new army and join up. The various motivations for joining the army will be explored using our extensive collection of recruitment posters. There were many reasons that men joined the army, including: moral outrage at the invasion of

neutrality; pure patriotism; hatred of the enemy; and even seeing the war as a chance to escape drudgery. An interactive exhibit will assess the visitor’s suitability for enlisting.

The process by which civilians became soldiers will be explained and the display will also show how they endured months of training before being sent to the front. It will look at the logistics of organising hundreds of thousands of highly-motivated volunteers into fighting units. Lord Kitchener, the man with whom the recruitment campaign is synonymous, will feature and the extent of his fame will be explored through items on which his image is emblazoned – such as soap, matchboxes, sweet tins and dolls.

For those unable to fight – women, older men and children – there were other ways in which they could show their support. This could include giving money to charities that

helped those in the front line, joining organisations like the Red Cross or the YMCA, and even showing support by hating the enemy. There were also those individuals who, under their own initiative, went above and beyond what was expected of them, such as Mairi Chisholm and Elsie Knocker, who travelled to the Western Front to establish a field hospital in the town of Pervyse; and Edith Cavell, the nurse who helped 200 Allied soldiers escape from occupied Belgium, and was then executed by the Germans.

Essentially the display is about the huge contribution by volunteers across Great Britain and the Empire to the war effort. We therefore ask all our Friends to contribute to this special appeal so that we can tell this important story.

We have raised £55,000 so far for this campaign. £50,000 was given as a grant to IWM last year

and the other £5,000 was donated following a direct mail campaign to 10% of the Friends. A mailing will be sent to the rest of the Friends in November. Any contribution, however large or small, will help us explain to our visitors why millions of people were driven to support the war effort in so many different ways.

IWM Friends Appeal £250,000 – £240,000 – £230,000 – £220,000 – £210,000 – £200,000 – £190,000 – £180,000 – £170,000 – £160,000 – £150,000 – £140,000 – £130,000 – £120,000 – £110,000 – £100,000 – £90,000 – £80,000 – £70,000 – £60,000 – October 2012

£50,000 – £40,000 – £30,000 –

An early sketch of a section of the Your Country Needs You display in IWM’s new First World War Galleries.

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SPECIAL OFFERS

Introduce a friend to the Friends and receive a free gift

Purchase a gift membership on 020 7416 5255 by 6 December 2012 and you will receive a free gift from the following selection:

Tickets to see Our Boys

Lawrence of Arabia 50th anniversary edition Blu-ray

The Duchess Theatre is pleased to offer two pairs of tickets to see Our Boys.

Six young soldiers are killing nothing but time as they recover from injuries incurred in the line of duty. Suddenly, their daily routine of TV, lonely hearts ads and banter is shattered by the arrival of a young officer. www.ourboystheplay.com

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment have generously donated five copies of a special 50th anniversary edition Blu-ray of David Lean’s masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia, widely considered one of the greatest and most influential films in the history of cinema.

It won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

Terms and conditions: Tickets are valid for Monday to Thursday performances until 30 November 2012 only, subject to availability. Prize is as stated and cannot be transferred or exchanged. No cash alternative will be offered. The producers reserve the right to restrict prizewinner tickets to specific performances during busy periods.

London 2012 Paralympic Games Blu-ray

Courtesy of Channel 4, we are pleased to offer five copies of the London 2012 Paralympic Games Blu-ray. Returning to the country where they began more than 60 years ago, the Paralympic Games placed London on the world stage once again, hosting 11 days of fierce competition for 4,200 athletes from 166 countries.

This new three-disc boxset gives fans the opportunity to relive the astonishing achievements of the Paralympians.

Love, Tommy by Andrew Roberts

Special offers for Friends 12 months for the price of 11 at The London Library Founded in 1841 The London Library is the world’s largest independent lending library, with more than one million books and periodicals in over 50 languages. It is pleased to offer IWM Friends a special annual membership offer of 12 months for the price of 11 months. To find out more please visit www.londonlibrary.co.uk/offer or contact the membership office on 020 7766 4720 and quote ‘IWM Friends Offer’.

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Courtesy of Osprey Publishing, we have 10 copies of Love, Tommy available. A legacy of an empire and a nation at war, Love, Tommy is a collection of letters housed at IWM sent by British and Commonwealth troops from the front lines of war to their loved ones at home.

5% off Historical Trips Historical Trips offer more than just battlefield tours.

Their historians outline the cultural and political contexts of historical events. In 2013 they will offer eight tours covering the various aspects of the First and Second World Wars, as well as the Spanish Civil War. These journeys range across Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Spain and Poland. IWM Friends are entitled to a 5% discount on tour prices. For further information please call 020 7993 6540 or email info@historicaltrips.com

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To book tickets for IWM Friends events please complete the enclosed application form or call us on 020 7416 5372

IWM FRIENDS EVENTS November 2012 to June 2013

IWM Friends AGM 20 November, 5pm Churchill War Rooms After the AGM there will be a talk

by Jonathan Dimbleby on the Battle of El Alamein, followed by a reception.

AGM only: Free (members only) Talk and Reception: £12 Talk: A Brilliant Little Operation 26 November, 7pm Kensington Central Library, Phillimore Walk, London, W8 7RX Sonia Purnell interviews Paddy Ashdown on his latest book, A Brilliant Little Operation: The Cockleshell Heroes and the Greatest Raid of WWII. IWM Friends and guests: £5 Christmas Evening 3 December, 6.15pm to 8pm IWM London An informal drop-in event with carol singing and mince pies. The shop and the Family in War exhibition will be open and there will be the opportunity to talk to IWM team members about the changes to the museum.

IWM Friends and guests: free Talk: Transforming IWM London 13 December, 2.30pm IWM London Ann Carter, Director of Regeneration, will talk about the plans to transform IWM London.

IWM Friends: £5, guests: £8 Visit: The Old Bailey 29 January, 5.45pm Lord Mayor’s Entrance, The Old Bailey, London, EC4M 7EH A tour of the most famous Criminal Court in the world.

IWM Friends: £15, guests: £17 Visit: Eton College 6 February, 2.30pm Eton College, Windsor, Berkshire, SL4 6DW Michael Paterson leads a guided tour of Eton College, focusing on its strong military connections.

IWM Friends: £16, guests: £18 Visit: The British Library 12 February, 6pm The British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB Curator Hedley Sutton will talk about the art on display in the Asian & African Studies Reading Room and show documents relating to the Indian Army and

the forces of the East India Company.

IWM Friends: £8, guests: £10.

Visit: The Foreign and Commonwealth Office 21 February, 6pm The Foreign and Commonwealth Office, King Charles Street, London SW1A 2AH A guided tour of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, including the Durbar Court and the India Office Council Chamber.

IWM Friends: £5, guests: £8 Visit: The National Archives 26 February, 2pm The National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey TW9 4DU Clive Hawkins leads a behind-thescenes tour of the National Archives.

IWM Friends: £8, guests: £10 Visit: Brighton Pavilion 7 March, 2pm 4/5 Pavilion Buildings, Brighton BN1 1EE A guided tour of the Pavilion, focusing on its use as a hospital for the Indian Army during the First World War. IWM Friends: £25, guests £27, includes cream tea The Fusilier Museum Please note: the date for this booking is yet to be confirmed but places can be reserved The Fusilier Museum, HM Tower of London, London, EC3N 4AB The museum’s curator, Major Bowes-Crick, will discuss selected items from his regiment’s collection followed by a viewing of galleries.

Friends: £10, guests: £12, includes tea and coffee Visit: National Army Museum and Royal Hospital Chelsea 19 March, 10.45am-4.30pm Meet at National Army Museum, Royal Hospital Road, London SW3 4HT A talk on the development of weaponry from 1900 to the present day and an opportunity to handle weapons. In the afternoon there will be tours of the Royal Hospital Chelsea followed by afternoon tea.

IWM Friends: £23, guests: £26, includes morning coffee and a full afternoon tea. Lunch not included.

Visit: Military Intelligence Museum 26 March, 11am Military Intelligence Museum, Chicksands, Bedfordshire SG17 5PR A guided tour of the Military Intelligence Museum, which combines the Intelligence Corps collection of artefacts with the Medmenham Collection of aerial imagery and reconnaissance.

IWM Friends: £10, guests: £12 Walk: Wartime Windsor 9 April, 2pm Meet outside Windsor Railway Station, Thames Street, Windsor SL4 1PJ Blue Badge Guide Mike Armitage leads a walking tour of Windsor and looks at how the two World Wars affected its inhabitants, royal and otherwise.

IWM Friends and guests: £15 Battle of Britain film and tour 20 April, 10.30am to 4pm IWM Duxford A screening of The Battle of Britain, much of which was filmed at IWM Duxford, followed by a Battle of Britain-themed tour.

IWM Friends: £15, guests: £18, includes tea, coffee and croissant on arrival

Above: IWM Duxford, where much of The Battle of Britain was filmed. See 20 April.

Visit: de Havilland Aircraft Heritage Centre 24 April, 2pm Salisbury Hall, London Colney, Hertfordshire AL2 1BU A presentation on the de Havilland Aircraft Company and a guided tour of their aircraft collection.

IWM Friends £15, guests; £17, includes tea and coffee Visit: Bentwaters Cold War Museum and Airfield 18 May, 11am to 4.30pm Bentwaters Parks, Rendlesham, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 2TW A private tour of Bentwaters Cold War Museum, housed in what was the USAF air base at RAF Bentwaters, and its airfield.

IWM Friends: £20, guests: £23 Colonel’s Review 8 June, 10am Horseguards, Whitehall, London The parade does not start until 11am, but it is essential for security reasons to be there by 10am.

IWM Friends: £15, guests: £17 Winter 2012 Despatches n 9

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Portraits from the ‘People’s War’ Curator Claire Brenard takes a closer look at an exhibition of Second World War portraits at IWM London Our latest exhibition, People’s War: Second World War Portraits, gives an insight into personal stories of bravery, survival and death against the backdrop of a changing society.

In 1939, Sir Kenneth Clark, Director of the National Gallery, formed the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC) which, funded by the Ministry of Information, commissioned and acquired an outstanding collection of British war art. Portraits played an important role as the committee was keen to represent everybody’s contribution to the war effort and to show Britain and the world ‘what sort of a people we are’.

After the war, the collection was given to museums, galleries and institutions in Great Britain and the Dominions. Of the 6,000 works collected, over half were allocated to the Imperial War Museum.

This exhibition explores a variety of portrait subjects: the armed forces and auxiliary services; the civilian war effort; the contribution of Britain’s allies and some personal wartime encounters.

Ethel Gabain was commissioned by the WAAC to produce a series called Children in Wartime. The exhibition contains a print from the series Evacuees in a Cottage at Cookham showing Mrs Norris with five evacuees from London in her care. The original wartime caption read ‘Mrs. Norris is the ideal foster-parent, and there are very many other householders like her.

Over a million children have been moved in school parties from the evacuation areas and with such large numbers, boarding-out in billets must always be the

Evacuees in a Cottage at Cookham

by Ethel Gabain, 1940.

principal means of finding home for them.

Given Mrs. Norris’ friendliness and care, town children readily adapt themselves to their new surroundings.’

Anthony Gross was able to capture the determination and poise of a French Resistance group when he travelled in Brittany after accompanying the Royal Army Service Corps to Normandy on DDay. Liberation and Battle of France: ‘La Campagnie Tito’, members of the ‘Maquis’ (French Resistance Movement) in the Maquis de Callac is one of a series of drawings he made of the local Maquis in 1944. The leader is wearing a key of Lannion Prison around his neck from which he and other members rescued eleven of their number the night before they were to be executed.

In addition to the WAAC collection, today IWM holds a number of Second World War portraits produced outside the official scheme. Many of these were produced by

artists working in the most difficult of circumstances, and these portraits reveal the tremendous psychological and physical stresses of wartime.

Ronald Searle became a prisoner of the Japanese in 1942 after the fall of Singapore. He was held in Changi prisoner of war camp before being sent to work on the Thailand-Burma Railway. During his three years of captivity, Searle sketched in secret, recording the suffering of his comrades. He presented his drawings to IWM in 1984. Searle used some of the corners of the drawings as cigarette paper, later explaining ‘However foul and acrid the result, however like choking over an autumn bonfire, it helped to hold off the constant clamouring of the stomach to be sent down something – anything.’

People’s War: Second World War Portraits is at IWM London until 1 January 2013.

IWM London, Lambeth Road, London SE1 6HZ, open every day (except 24, 25, 26 December and from 2 January to July 2013) 10am to 6pm.

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A wounded French soldier is taken ashore on a stretcher at Dover, after being evacuated from Dunkirk, 1940.

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SAVING LIVES: FRONTLINE MEDICINE IN A CENTURY OF CONFLICT Historian Matthew Brosnan gives an insight into a new exhibition chronicling a century of progress in medicine on the front line.

A Second World War poster, designed by Abram Games, warning against the threat of malaria.

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In many ways, war and medicine are contradictory. One involves military action that often damages and ends lives. The other seeks to find ways of saving and prolonging lives. Yet the challenges of war have contributed to some of the major medical developments of the last hundred years, from vaccinations to plastic surgery and penicillin.

This theme is at the heart of a new exhibition at IWM North, Saving Lives: Frontline Medicine in a Century of Conflict, which explores war and medicine from the First World War to the present conflict in Afghanistan.

The exhibition looks at the routine elements of military medicine, including preparations for service and the threat of disease. Visitors are then taken through the typical stages of a casualty’s journey through the medical chain, from the noise and danger of the front line to the hectic field hospital and onto convalescence, specialist care and rehabilitation at home.

Throughout this journey, the experiences of individual soldiers and medics show how military medicine has changed over time and how many of these developments have found their way into the civilian healthcare we all receive today.

It is the first time IWM has dedicated an exhibition to this topic and many of the artefacts and stories included have never been on display before. The exhibition presented an opportunity to delve into IWM collections old and new, including material relating to the war in Afghanistan only recently acquired through the War Story project. Our collections are supplemented with additions on loan from other institutions and individuals.

As well as physical artefacts, the exhibition features digital content

presented through interactive touch screens. This includes film, photographs and audio interviews from our collections.

It also incorporates clips from specially commissioned films with interviewees including Andy Reid, a triple amputee seriously wounded by an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) in Afghanistan, and Professor Jim Ryan, a former Army surgeon whose long career included performing emergency surgery in the Falklands in 1982.

Whilst Saving Lives covers a hundred year period, it begins in the twenty-first century. The first thing visitors see is Serial Loop, a video artwork by David Cotterrell, who was commissioned by the Wellcome Trust to reflect on the work of the Joint Forces Medical Group in Afghanistan in 2007. This looped film depicts the arrival and departure of a Medical Emergency Response Team (MERT) Chinook helicopter at Camp Bastion. It is one of two Cotterrell artworks featured in the exhibition.

Visitors enter the exhibition via the ramp of a mocked-up Chinook. Film clips show the journey of a MERT helicopter from Camp Bastion to the front line and back again, with the overwhelming noise of the Chinook’s rotor blades providing a harsh soundtrack to the evacuation of a casualty.

Photographs by former Army photographer Jon Bevan and a painting by Donald Macdonald also illustrate the evacuation journey.

The exhibition begins with an overview of the preparations and training that both medics and soldiers go through before serving in a warzone. In this area, the display uses content recently acquired through the War Story project. This includes a camouflage-covered edition ‹ Winter 2012 Despatches n 13

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Through exhibits, diaries, artworks and audio clips, visitors can discover the conditions that medics worked under in the front line. The First World War experiences of the stretcher-bearer Leonard Stagg and the nurse Mairi Chisholm are told in their own words.

Artefacts from a First World War folding operating table to a portable medical laboratory chest that accompanied a naval surgeon during D-Day help to convey that whilst the dangerous conditions of the front line remain constant, the medical treatment of casualties has evolved.

One of the critical factors in improved survival rates over the last hundred years has been changes in transport. As visitors turn a corner of the gallery, a chart shows how helicopters, in particular, have given casualties quicker access to specialist medical care. During the First World War, a casualty might reach a Casualty Clearing Station in approximately ten hours. Today in Afghanistan, the equivalent process usually takes under an hour. That reduction in time has saved lives. At the centre of the exhibition is a new acquisition – a Land Rover ambulance heavily damaged by mortar fire in Iraq in 2007 – highlighting how even medical transport can be hazardous.

The role of the field hospital is examined.

Artwork and photographs show wards housed in tents or temporary buildings during the two world wars. A collection of uniforms and letters loaned by Major Margaret Barclay-Cooke, a senior nurse, highlights how conditions in a field hospital within a warzone could still be basic and improvised even as recently as 1982, during the Falklands War. This is contrasted with the advanced facilities of

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‹ of the New Testament picked up by Captain Jon Bell of 207 (Manchester) Field Hospital before he was deployed to Afghanistan.

This area of the gallery also explores routine, but often still dangerous, aspects of health. Up until the First World War, it was generally disease that killed more soldiers than battle. The First World War saw the first major use of vaccinations and by the time of the Second World War troops were bombarded with posters, leaflets and medicines aiming to warn and protect them against diseases from malaria to syphilis. A range of exhibits – from a First World War private purchase medical kit to a Second World War water sterilisation kit and an Afghanistan issue disposable toilet bag – reveal the importance of the battle against disease.

The exhibition looks at the dangers of the front line, exploring battlefield injuries, first aid and initial treatment by medics.

Here visitors can see shell and bullet fragments that injured servicemen in both world wars and listen to Sergeant Billy Moore MC describing being wounded in Afghanistan. A large painting depicts the moment artist Harold Sandys Williamson was shot in the hand when serving in the First World War. First aid dressings from different conflicts show how medical kit has changed over time. Items carried by today’s patrol medics in Afghanistan demonstrate how equipment is designed to be used in the challenging conditions of the front line. These are juxtaposed against an ornate medical chest, on loan to IWM, which belonged to Captain Noel Chavasse, the double VC winner who lost his life on the Western Front whilst treating casualties under fire.

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the field hospital at Camp Bastion, Afghanistan, shown and described in film and interview clips and in David Cotterrell’s artwork Green Room. This reflects the tension of waiting as medical staff at Camp Bastion prepare for the arrival of casualties.

The field hospital has tended to be the stage where specialist care begins to take place. A touch screen interactive based on the human body allows visitors to find out more about the experience, effects and treatments of different battlefield injuries, including surgery. Artefacts on display range from a First World War form filled out for a possible case of ‘shell shock’ to the illustrated case notes of a heart and lung specialist surgeon during the Second World War. Two of the most significant medical developments of the last hundred years are also explored. The huge improvements in blood transfusions are shown, particularly during the Second World War period when the Army Blood Transfusion Service provided blood and expertise to British personnel across the globe.

Developments in the treatment of wound infection, particularly penicillin, are also examined. On display are artefacts relating to Charles Frampton, a young soldier who died as a result of wound infection during the First World War, yet who might have survived had he suffered a similar wound during the Second World War. For those casualties seriously wounded, the medical journey continued at home.

For some, this involved convalescence, but for others there could be a long process of surgery and treatment still to come, as well as long-term effects from their injuries. During the two world wars, convalescent facilities could range from converted country houses like Langton ‹

Alfred Thomson, A Saline Bath, RAF Hospital (1943).

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Above: A scene at an Advanced Dressing Station at Tilloy-les-Mofflaines in France, April 1917.

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Below: Medics treat and assess casualties in the Emergency Department of the field hospital at Camp Bastion, Afghanistan, 2007.

Winter 2012 Despatches n 15

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‹ Hall in Leicestershire, whose admissions book is on display, to prominent buildings like the Brighton Pavilion, with a painting showing how wounded Indian soldiers were housed there during the First World War. The experiences of medical staff are also shown, including the story of Dorothy Irving-Bell, a nurse who served in both world wars.

The traumas of war could affect the mind as well as the body. Amongst the most famous facilities for treating psychological casualties during the First World War was Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh. The well-known neurologist WHR Rivers treated the poet Siegfried Sassoon here – Sassoon’s medical case sheet is on display – despite the latter not displaying major psychological symptoms.

A series of letters by another officer at Craiglockhart, James Butlin, describe life at the hospital through the eyes of a patient who was eventually discharged as medically unfit. These personal stories help to convey the complexity and range of psychological trauma. A video interview with Sergeant Emma McCambley, a specialist mental health nurse in the RAF, helps to show how these issues are dealt with in today’s armed forces.

The exhibition also considers specialist surgical treatment in the UK, in the form of the rapid development of plastic surgery and its application in treating serious facial injuries and burns. In Britain during the First World War Harold Gillies was at the forefront of pioneering plastic surgery, using early skin grafting methods to repair the terrible effects of shell fragments and bullets on the human face.

By the Second World War, Gillies was joined by a group of expert plastic

surgeons. One of them was Archibald McIndoe, Gillies’ cousin, who became a household name for his work with RAF burns patients, and they christened themselves the ‘Guinea Pig Club’ with characteristic black humour. On display are surgical instruments used by Gillies, McIndoe and fellow surgeon Rainsford Mowlem, as well as sketches of patients during treatment by artists Henry Tonks and Diana ‘Dickie’ Orpen – all of which have been loaned by other institutions.

Further material from IWM collections helps to add the patient’s perspective on this evolving form of treatment.

This area of the exhibition also explores rehabilitation and the serious long-term effects of battlefield injury. Featured here is Lieutenant Hugh Bird MC, an officer who was reported dead in 1918 yet had actually been taken prisoner and later underwent a series of operations on his serious leg wound, before being awarded a pension for the rest of his long life. On the wall can be seen the nude portrait of Lance Corporal Nick Davis, who lost a leg and sustained serious injuries to his hip in an IED blast in Afghanistan in 2007. As visitors see Davis’ scars for themselves, they can also listen to sound recordings in which he describes his rehabilitation and the experience of sitting for the painting.

False limbs, crutches and an invalid carriage issued to First and Second World War veterans are displayed, contrasting with the advanced technology of today’s prosthetic limbs. In a filmed interview, Corporal Andy Reid describes his rehabilitation after losing both legs and an arm to an IED in Afghanistan, as well as explaining how his modern prosthetics work. His story highlights how service personnel are now surviving major injuries

that ten years ago would have been fatal, but emphasises that this requires specialist care and long-term support.

A modern day C-Leg that uses computerised technology, of the kind used by Andy Reid, is displayed in the final section. This area illustrates how much military medicine has developed over the last hundred years, as well as how relevant those developments have been to everyday civilian life. From surgical techniques to evacuation transport and blood transfusion to wound infection, improved methods have helped increase survival rates.

Many of these developments might not have happened as quickly, or even at all, had it not been for the need created by wartime conditions. Penicillin is perhaps the ultimate example of this – a wonder drug discovered in raw form by Alexander Fleming in 1928, but only adapted into a mass-produced medicine by a team of scientists during the Second World War. This emphasises that whilst war is inherently destructive, it can also be a source of accelerated creativity. As Professor Jim Ryan, an academic and former Army surgeon, comments in one of the video interviews: ‘Penicillin... the use of blood and blood products... war has forced their development at speed... maybe war is not good but at least there is some good side to it.’

Saving Lives: Frontline Medicine in a Century of Conflict is at IWM North until 1 September 2013. IWM North, The Quays, Trafford Wharf Road, Trafford Park, Manchester M17 1TZ. Open daily (except 24, 25, 26 December) 10am to 6pm (1 March to 31 October), 10am to 5pm (1 November to 28 February).

Badly burned RAF pilot Paul Hart shown during skin grafting treatment in 1940. He was a member of the ‘Guinea Pig Club’, being treated by Archibald McIndoe at the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead.

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The journey to rehabilitation Sergeant Ian Forysth, a former army photographer, describes his visit to the Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre at Headley Court in Surrey, which has taken the lead in the rehabilitation and recovery process for troops injured through operations.

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Last year I visited the Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre at Headley Court in Surrey to attend the launch of a newlyrefurbished greenhouse and allotment area. The aim is to challenge patients with complex injuries and try to encourage them to overcome the difficulties of working at different heights; standing on slopes and uneven surfaces; as well as lifting and moving objects – all of which ultimately aid their recovery process.

The gardening tasks also provide cognitive therapy for the troops. There is some evidence to suggest that being in an outdoor environment reduces stress, which leads to improved concentration and encourages people to think through their problems or concerns.

Much has already been written about the fortitude and strength of character of injured troops as they make their long and challenging journey back to some

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Pictured: from far left: Private Scott Meenagh and Guardsman Lamin Manneh.

Above: from top, Guardsman Colum McGeown and Marine Tristan Sykes.

kind of ‘normal’ life, as far as their injuries will allow.

In talking to some of the soldiers and marines it was obvious that they had been through some deeply traumatic experiences, but generally they remained positive about their progress and their future situations. All were complimentary about their treatment at the centre. The time frames involved between being injured and eventually walking, albeit on prosthetic limbs, were quite remarkable.

In one case it was only a matter of weeks.

As one of the injured servicemen, speaking about the moment he was caught in an IED blast said, ‘It happened on the battlefield, that was always going to be a risk, but you have to accept that risk.

What you going to do?…You just have to get on with it.’

One of the soldiers, Guardsman Lamin Manneh from Windsor, was wounded in an

IED blast in Afghanistan. At the time that I met him he had a home in Windsor where he lived with his wife and young son.

Originally from The Gambia, he lost his left arm and both of his legs during a patrol in Helmand Province. One would think that these kind of wounds would be enough to leave anyone broken and despairing and yet, despite his injuries, I’ve seldom met a more positive or cheerful person.

He told me that the rehabilitation process he had gone through was very demanding and challenging, frequently leaving him completely worn out, physically exhausted, mentally drained and at times frustrated. He spoke of the great work the nurses and physiotherapists do and how they pushed the patients, in a controlled way, to allow them to reach their full potential on their own journeys to recovery.

Some spoke with great frankness about how their injuries were sustained.

How they were tossed in the air as the IED detonated, literally under their feet, how they remembered somersaulting several times before landing heavily on their back and looking down at their missing legs.

Others spoke of how they were looking forward to leaving Headley Court and finishing their treatment. Some had definite ideas of what they wanted to do when they began life in the civilian world.

Although others were less certain, none of them, at any time, mentioned that the injuries they have would be a reason not to do what they wanted. You cannot help but feel that because these troops have endured some of the worst possible experiences that nothing will faze them in the future and they seem stronger for that.

Winter 2012 Despatches n 19

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Corporal Cartwright of 1st Battalion, The Rifles, on the Honda motorbike now in IWM’s collections.

War Story ’s new acquisition IWM Historian Amanda Mason on the latest addition to our War Story: Serving in Afghanistan exhibition 20 n Despatches Winter 2012

On 4 May 2011, members of C Company, 1st Battalion, The Rifles, encountered two insurgents riding a new Honda motorbike on a track in Nahr E Saraj (South). As the men tried to get away from the soldiers, they lost control of the bike, dropped it and disappeared into the nearest village.

The motorbike was recovered by the soldiers and taken back to their base.

At the end of their tour of Afghanistan, Captain James Bewley contacted IWM through the War Story project and offered to donate the motorbike to the museum. Our curators were understandably keen to accept the vehicle for the collection and the Ministry of Defence helped to make arrangements to transport it back to the UK from the main British base at Camp Bastion.

Unfortunately, in November 2011 the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan was closed. This meant that the transport vehicles bringing back the motorbike – along with much of the soldiers’ bulky kit and equipment – had to be re-routed. We heard that the bike had eventually reached the 1 Rifles base at Beachley Barracks near Chepstow in June 2012.

The motorbike is the largest item yet to be donated through the War Story project and it is the only piece of ‘enemy’ kit we have acquired so far.

Motorbikes such as this one are frequently used by Taliban scouts to observe and report on the movements of British troops. They give the insurgents freedom of movement and help them to blend in with the local population. The acquisition of the motorbike will help us record and illustrate this aspect of the conflict.

Several new objects have also been added to War Story: Serving in Afghanistan over the summer, including a knife used by Royal Marines from 40 Commando during an attempt to rescue soldiers from a blazing helicopter. New digital photographs and interviews have been added to the interactive screens, including some of the very latest material, acquired from service personnel who returned from Afghanistan earlier this year.

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A steam tractor with the mounting of a 6 inch naval gun and a French Renault tank on its trailers during the move to South Kensington. The move was not welcomed by one Kensington resident, who wrote to complain about his street being “completely ruined by all the heavy traffic of guns, lorries and tractors.”

BEHIND-THE-SCENES

IWM: A museum on the move As IWM London prepares for its temporary closure Sarah Henning and Gill Smith, of IWM’s Archives, look at the history of its relocation.

In recent weeks we have seen many familiar objects disappearing from the Large Exhibits Gallery, to say nothing of the hundreds of items being carefully removed, out of sight of the public, from the galleries on the lower ground floor too. But Transforming IWM London is just the latest in a long history of moves.

Indeed, there isn’t a decade in IWM’s lifetime when there hasn’t been a major project based around accommodation.

It all began in 1917, the year the National (later Imperial) War Museum was founded. The Museum Committee established by the War Cabinet in March of that year was tasked not only with gathering exhibits for the museum’s collection, but also with finding a home for it. Unsurprisingly the collecting programme took priority and forged ahead during the next three years. The matter of where to house it proved to be rather more taxing. Between 1917 and 1920, newly-acquired objects went on

display in a series of temporary but very well-attended exhibitions, including at the Royal Academy and the Whitechapel Gallery. Meanwhile the Committee developed various ideas for a permanent home, investigating more than nine sites across London and focusing on a purposebuilt memorial hall to display objects ranging from the large canvases of Paul Nash, John Singer Sargent and others, to the thousands of poignant photographs of fallen and decorated servicemen and women workers which were being collected from families around the country. And there needed to be space to accommodate the artillery pieces, weaponry and early aircraft too.

Grand plans for a new building were abandoned post-war and in 1919 the IWM Committee accepted an offer from the governors of Crystal Palace. Interestingly, the venue had been considered previously and dismissed as unsuitable, but exhibits were installed, within a period of just six weeks, for a Royal opening in June 1920. The galleries were spacious enough to house the collection of large exhibits and popular enough to attract some three million visitors over four years.

But earlier concerns about suitability proved well founded: environmentally,

with temperatures ranging from -1⁰C to 32⁰C, it was totally unsuitable and within a year the majority of the works of art had been removed. These were returned to storage or despatched to loan exhibitions around the country.

The tenure at Crystal Palace came to an end in 1924 and the museum took over a small suite of galleries adjacent to the Imperial Institute in South Kensington.

Exhibition space was drastically reduced from 230,000 to less than 50,000 square feet, providing accommodation for about a third of the collection. At this point the aircraft were placed on loan for exhibition at the Science Museum; many exhibits went into store; and a significant proportion was disposed of.

It must have been quite a sight to witness the removal of the exhibits through the streets of London.

According to the records, 275 loads of exhibits weighing approximately 800 tons were moved during this period, with only three instances of minor damage to objects reported. Despite the extremely cramped conditions, parts of the collection remained on show at South Kensington until a new, permanent home was found in the buildings of the former Bethlem ‹ Winter 2012 Despatches n 21

‹ Hospital on Lambeth Road. In 1936

collections were on the move again.

So the removal of exhibits in the galleries during autumn 2012 is not the first time they have been in transit. It is interesting to compare how these events have been documented. This time round use of new technology has allowed us to record time-lapse video footage of the moves. The removal of exhibits and frequently changing atrium displays whilst IWM London remains open have proved to be an exciting PR exercise and social media sites have enabled our supporters to keep track of tanks on their route from London to Duxford. No doubt some of you will have been following progress on Twitter or keeping up with our Transforming IWM London blog.

Building work will begin in January when IWM London will close to the public for six months. We eagerly await the return of exhibits and the next phase of exhibitions.

For the latest news please visit our Transforming IWM London blog at http://blogs.iwm.org.uk/ transforming-iwm-london/

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exhibits were transferred again – for what was hoped would be the final time.

Just three years after the exhibitions were installed at Southwark, war was declared and the art collection was evacuated. The museum was closed to the public until 1946 when new, Second World War exhibits were installed alongside original collections.

Refurbishment works were completed in the mid 1950s, but the collection was too extensive for it all to be displayed at Lambeth Road. A breakthrough came in 1971 when large exhibits could be removed from London stores to buildings at RAF Duxford. These eventually formed the core of exhibitions at IWM Duxford when the Trustees acquired the airfield in 1976.

Plans to expand and develop the Lambeth Road building were first drawn up in the 1960s when new collections storage was added, but it wasn’t until 1982 that designs were approved to infill the courtyard and use the internal footprint of the building fully. Before demolition work began in 1986 the

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The Sopwith Camel is lowered from its position in the Large Exhibits Gallery gallery in October 2012. It had been suspended among the displays since 1989.

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Top: In the early years IWM’s exhibits seemed to be on the move regularly. The 13-pounder gun of E Battery, Royal Horse Artillery leaves the building at South Kensington to take part in the unveiling of CS Jagger’s Royal Artillery Memorial in October 1925. This is the gun which fired the first British round on the Western Front; today it is on display at IWM North.

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ACQUISITIONS

Anthony Richards, Head of IWM’s Documents and Sound Collections, on a recent acquisition – a letter by the socialist writer Max Plowman, written in 1918, resigning his commission for reasons of conscientious objection.

‘Reasons for resigning’ ‘A shell-shocked infantry officer sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh for treatment by the eminent psychiatrist Dr WHR Rivers, only to develop a conscientious objection against continuing to fight which led to his publication of anti-war poetry and a statement in which he declared his antiwar beliefs.’

One would be forgiven for thinking that this description applies to the famous war poet Siegfried Sassoon, or indeed to Sassoon’s contemporary Wilfred Owen.

In fact, it refers to another person altogether who shares some surprising parallels with these other writers.

Max Plowman was thirty years old at the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 and was becoming established as a socialist writer. On Christmas Eve of that year he enlisted, somewhat reluctantly, into the Territorial Force, initially training as an orderly with the 4th Field Ambulance stationed in Essex. Despite believing that the fighting was ultimately wrong, he felt an obligation to contribute to the country’s war effort in at least a medical capacity. However, he soon came to 24 n Despatches Winter 2012

believe that it was wrong to expect others to fight on his behalf without doing so himself and sought a commission in an infantry regiment. Appointed a junior officer in the 10th Battalion, the West Yorkshire Regiment, Plowman saw active service on the Western Front and from July 1916 experienced first-hand the harsh realities of trench warfare.

In January 1917, stationed near Albert on the Somme, Plowman suffered concussion from a shell explosion and was invalided back to England in order to recover. Suffering badly from nerves, he received treatment from Dr WHR Rivers at Bowhill Auxiliary, a branch of Craiglockhart War Hospital. Rivers was the notable psychiatrist who pioneered the treatment and rehabilitation of soldiers suffering from mental disorders.

During the period of his recovery, Plowman continued to develop his socialist and pacifist views by writing a poetry collection, A Lap Full of Seed, and a pamphlet entitled The Right to Live.

Perhaps inspired by the actions of Siegfried Sassoon, an infantry officer and fellow patient of Rivers who in July 1917

had made a very public statement in open defiance of the way in which the war was being fought, Plowman submitted a declaration affirming his own decision to resign his commission on 4 January 1918, shortly before he was due to resume active service overseas.

Earlier this year, IWM’s Department of Collections was fortunate to acquire a signed typescript copy of Plowman’s ‘Reasons for Resigning’, which appears to be the author’s personal copy of the document which he presented to his Army superiors. This passionate and eloquent statement of his beliefs regarding the conscientious objection which he held to further fighting is a fine example of an individual act of bravery in the face of public criticism and national expectations: I am resigning my commission because I now believe that “national responsibility” is an insufficient excuse for committing acts, in the name of the nation, which no sane person would be guilty of as an individual. I believe that no government has the right to make pledges which may require a single member of the community to kill on behalf of his

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government, for no government has the right to expect – much less to compel – any individual to commit crime for any reason whatever. ...If it is said that the middle of a war is not fit time to come to such a conclusion, I reply that every moment is opportune in which we cease to do evil and learn to do good. We have no right to continue in an evil course because our behaviour in the past has led others to expect this of us.

I am resigning my commission because, while I cannot comprehend a transcendent God, I believe that God is incarnate in every human being and that so long as life persists in the human body, soul and body are one and inseparable, God being the life of both. From which it follows that killing men is killing God. I believe that when it is realised that the body is the outward manifestation of God and that divinity and humanity are synonyms, men will hold in the utmost abhorrence the terrible sacrilege of war or capital punishment.

Hence I believe that if I now continued to act as a soldier I should be guilty of the greatest crime it is possible for a human being to commit. Murder done in the heat of passion; rape committed through uncontrollable lust; treachery due to moral weakness are venial sins compared with the unspeakable crime of calmly resolving to destroy the lives of unknown

persons whose individual characters – whether supremely good or evil – you have no means of knowing – but who, nevertheless, you must endeavour to kill for the solitary crime of being obedient to the laws of their own nation.

The designed and intentional killing of any person against whose personal character you can make no charge is, I consider, murder of the worst possible kind. Such murder betrays, not the unreasoning passion of an animal, but the calculated and deliberate perversion of reason and is therefore immoral to the last degree.

I believe that justice to the individual is the basis of all law: the only seed from which civil, national and international justice can be raised; hence it follows that the unreasonable murder of a single person strikes at the root of all law and order. As an orderly citizen of the world I must therefore decline to be guilty of the most disorderly and unlawful act I can imagine.

I am resigning my commission because I no longer believe that war can end war.

War is a disorder and disorder cannot breed order. Doing evil that good may come is apparent folly. ...I believe the only way to achieve lasting peace is to establish an international parliament for the making and maintaining of international law. This should be done immediately and before the unlawful

force of armies is permitted to inflict further injustice upon the world. (signed Max Plowman, January 1918) As a result of his declaration, Plowman was put under military arrest and confined to quarters, receiving a court martial in April 1918 which led to his subsequent dismissal from the British Army. The delays and administrative complexities of the government’s conscription legislation, together with the approaching likelihood of an Armistice announcement, meant that Plowman was fortunate enough to avoid the expected fate of imprisonment as a civilian conscientious objector.

After the war, he continued to promote his socialist and pacifist beliefs through his writing, especially in the noted literary journal The Adelphi. In 1927 published to some acclaim a memoir of his wartime experiences, A Subaltern on the Somme, under the pseudonym ‘Mark VII’ (the official designation for the lowest common denominator of infantry warfare, the .303 cartridge of the Lee-Enfield rifle).

Plowman’s important interwar career as an advocate of pacifism led to his appointment as general secretary of the Peace Pledge Union following its founding in 1935, while the growing anxieties over the likelihood of another major international war were, of course, justified shortly before Max Plowman’s death on 3 June 1941.

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It is now 14 years since I started to work in Iraq. Initially I was mainly working on issues of reconciliation between the various religious and political leaders and their equivalents in the West. In the early days I took them to see Billy Graham in America and the Archbishop of Canterbury in England.

My interest in reconciliation began when I was preparing for ordination at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. It was there that I worked on the restoration of a broken relationship between Jewish and Christian students. However, my real work in reconciliation at an international level began when, in 1998, I was appointed Director of the International Centre for Reconciliation in Baghdad, one of the foremost centres for reconciliation in the world.

The role which Coventry Cathedral has played in reconciliation is truly exceptional and began 58 years before I arrived in Baghdad. On the night of 14 November 1940 the city of Coventry was totally destroyed. The Second World War was well underway but never to date had a city been devastated to such an extent.

The medieval Cathedral of St Michael, named after the archangel and great protector, was obliterated. Standing in the midst of the smouldering rubble the next morning, the Cathedral’s leader at the time, Provost Dick Howard, took a piece of chalk and wrote on the sanctuary wall ‘Father forgive’ . He did not write the words in full which are ‘Father forgive them, they know not what they do’. Since the bombing ‘Father forgive’ has been used as the response in the Coventry Litany of Reconciliation, which is prayed in the Cathedral every day at noon, the first line of which is ‘All have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God’. In this act Provost Howard was giving birth to one of the leading ministries of reconciliation in the world today.

Days after the city was bombed, a member of the Cathedral staff noticed that amongst the rubble were the large medieval nails that had held the roof together. He took three nails and attached them together. Today this is known around the world as the Coventry Cross of Nails and is the symbol of reconciliation.

When I see the Coventry Cross on the altar of my own church it reminds me that reconciliation is about mending that which is broken. Iraq is broken and we are working at its restoration.

My work in Baghdad is very varied. Despite Iraq not being in the news much now, it is still a total war zone. Bomb barricades surround us and there are military checkpoints at regular intervals on the roads.

I am the vicar of St George’s church in Baghdad, the only Anglican church in the country. This is far more than just a church. Within our compound we have one of the largest clinics in Iraq. There are four doctors, two dental surgeries, hematology and stem cell units, a pharmacy, laboratory and an X- Ray unit. It is a comprehensive health care centre and all treatment is free.

There is also an infants’ school and a major food relief programme to help the many poor of our community, which is both Christian and Muslim.

I am involved in numerous church-related activities – I am chaplain at the US Embassy and I conduct services at the British Embassy. However, my non-Christian work involves working on religious sectarianism, bringing together those that have traditionally been enemies, such as the Sunni and Shia Islamic leaders. In this capacity I chair the High Council of Religious Leaders in Iraq. We cannot reject the role that religion plays in violence. As Archbishop William Temple said in the Second World War ‘when religion goes wrong, it goes very wrong’.

26 n Despatches Winter 2012

Reconciliation in a war zone

As we approach the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the Reverend Canon Andrew White, Anglican chaplain to Iraq and International Director of the Iraqi Institute of Peace, describes the work he has done on reconciliation between the country’s religious factions.

The vast majority of violence in Iraq is carried out by people who use terrorism to justify their religious stance. If you examine the position of each group it is clear that they commit violence because they have a profound sense of loss. I work closely with the major leader of the Sunnis in Iraq, Sheikh Khalid, who is a great man of peace. He has often said to me that 80% of the violence is carried out by people of his own tradition. Saddam was a Sunni and since the war it cannot be denied that this group of people have lost a huge amount of money in de-Baathification, property, industry, employment, and ultimately they have lost power. Under Saddam the Sunnis were the minority political leaders of the nation and now it is the majority Shia who rule.

They are therefore against the Shia majority and against any who are seen as being part of the group who led the war in 2003 – the Americans, the British and the other countries which were part of the original coalition.

The terrorist leaders are not even from Iraq; they are mainly from the surrounding Arab nations and here are simply known as AQI (Al Qaeda Iraq). They paid and supported the Sunni Iraqis to carry out the worst of the suicide bombings. But you cannot buy people here, you can only hire them, and when the US Army offered the Sunni Iraqis more payment to join a group called the Sons of Iraq, many accepted. The role of the Sons of Iraq is to work for peace. Whilst this group was functioning we saw a ‹

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Canon Andrew White (centre), Vicar of St. George’s Church in Baghdad, with two soldiers.

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‹ decrease in violence. Since the US Army’s withdrawal in 2011 we have once again seen it steadily rise.

Of particular sadness was the formation of groups such as The Birds of Paradise around the Northern town of Kirkuk. These were a group of children, aged between nine and thirteen, trained to be suicide bombers because as children they were less likely to have to undergo intense security checks that would expose their evil intent. In recent weeks a new group has been established, based in Hilla, the modern town of Babylon. Called the Fourth Brigade, this group is comprised of children who are even younger, aged from seven to thirteen. Once again this group appears to be the work of AQI. It is believed that they will target Iraqi Christians because they are seen to be linked to the West.

There have been Christians in Iraq for more years than most other places in the world. It is an acknowledged fact that monotheistic religion began with the arrival of Jonah in Nineveh followed by the work of the prophet Nahum. The people of this city, the Assyrians, started to believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Seven hundred years later somebody else turned up on the way to India. Here he is much revered and simply known as Mar Thoma. He asked the people of Nineveh if they knew the Messiah had come. They said that they did not, he told them and they believed. This man to us in the West is known as Doubting Thomas. To this very day, 2,700 years after Jonah, most of the Christians in Iraq and my entire congregation are from the city of Nineveh.

It was on the last day of October in 2010 that everything changed for Christians in Iraq. AQI gunmen broke into the Syrian Catholic Church during a service and killed 59 people. What followed was over two months of massacring, killing and torturing Christians.

I began a period of intense engagement with the various religious leaders of Iraq, particularly the Sunni community. Two weeks after the tragedy Sheik Khalid spoke in my church. He expressed his sadness and sorrow about what had happened and assured the people that they were a vital part of Iraq. Intensive negotiations continued to arrange an urgent meeting of the religious leaders to enable us to unite in condemning all violence towards minorities. The Danish Ambassador, Gert Meinecle, and his government came to the rescue. By early January we took the various religious leaders to Copenhagen where we were joined by the Sunni and Shia Islamic leaders as well as those from three other minorities – the Christians, Yazidees and Mandians.

Day and night we worked on the fatwa (Islamic religious injunction) and declaration not to permit violence against minorities. The Islamic leaders told their contacts that there was a historic joint Sunni and Shia fatwa forbidding the killing of minorities. The effect was instantaneous and attacks against Christians stopped immediately.

Tragically, a month later a Christian family in Baghdad were attacked and killed. The terrorists had informed us that this would happen after one month if we did not continue working with the Islamic leaders. Despite the fatwa, many Christians fled Iraq after these attacks.

The Danish meeting was a quick response to the crisis and it worked in a way we never thought possible. We have continued to hold meetings of religious leaders of Iraq, often overseas.

There has also been a lot of work at a grass roots level to carry the message around the country. This is aimed at the lower-level 28 n Despatches Winter 2012

The ruins of Coventry Cathedral two days after the German Luftwaffe air raid on the city on the night of 14 November 1940.

‘A member of the Coventry Cathedral staff noticed amongst the rubble large medieval nails that had held the roof together. He took three nails and attached them together.

Today this is known around the world as the Coventry Cross of Nails and is the symbol of reconciliation. When I see the Coventry Cross on the altar of my own church it reminds me that reconciliation is about mending that which is broken. Iraq is broken and we are working at its restoration.’

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Islamic leaders such as imams of local mosques and is based around different areas in Iraq. Whilst this work has been very successful, there are serious concerns as to what will happen now with increased violence and the establishment of groups such as the Fourth Brigade in Hilla.

Iraq today is in a total mess: politically, economically, socially and educationally. It is a land facing one of the greatest levels of corruption in the world. The streets and infrastructure are falling to pieces and yet Iraq has one of the largest oil reserves in the world.

A particular concern is the continued large number of Iraqis claiming asylum overseas, particularly amongst Christians. The position of all the religious leaders on this issue is clear – they are

all against any of their people leaving Iraq. Are they at risk?

Yes, everybody is, but this nation will never be restored if all the good people leave. Also, people with children are being made to return when they have spent most of their life out of Iraq. The possibility of those children being able to resettle here is very remote.

Iraq continues in a state of war. Thousands have fled to Kurdistan in the safe north of Iraq and more have fled to Turkey. The surrounding turmoil in places like Syria has just added to the pain of Iraq. Many from here who sought refuge in Syria have now returned and are living in refugee camps at the borders. Yonadam Kanna, the main Christian political leader in Iraq, says ‘if the Christians all leave this land the root is removed and the tree dies’.

Winter 2012 Despatches n 29

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WHAT’S ON

November 2012 to May 2103

For further information visit www.iwm.org.uk

LONDON Lambeth Road, London SE1 6HZ 020 7416 5000 Open daily 10am to 6pm (except 24, 25, 26 December) To buy tickets for charging exhibitions and events visit the website or call 020 7416 5439.

Friends receive free, unlimited entry to all charging exhibitions.

EXHIBITIONS War Story Until 18 December 2012 First-hand experiences of British Service personnel in Afghanistan.

A Family in Wartime Until 1 January 2013 The story of the Allpress family in the Second World War – looking at both their lives at home and in the wider world at war, from the London Blitz to D-Day. People’s War: Second World War Portraits 2 June 2012 to 1 January 2013 From official oil paintings to informal drawings by artists such as Stanley Spencer, Edward Bawden and Ronald Searle, this exhibition of Second World War portraits offers an insight into personal stories of bravery, survival and death, and a society undergoing tremendous changes.

Breakthrough Until 1 January 2013 IWM London’s permanent art gallery – Breakthrough –has been refreshed with a new selection of artworks on display in the First World War, Second World War and post-1945 spaces.

Cecil Beaton: Theatre of War Until 1 January 2013 A retrospective of Cecil Beaton’s war photography.

Admission: Friends free, Adults £8, Concessions £6

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EVENTS Cecil Beaton: Preserving the Legacy Evening panel discussion 21 November 2012, 7pm Join the experts who have played a role in preserving Cecil Beaton’s legacy, including his biographer Hugo Vickers and IWM’s Head of Photography Hilary Roberts, as they discuss the challenges and opportunities in presenting his work today. Other panellists include Francesca Franchi, Head of Collections at Royal Opera House, Susanna Brown, Curator of Photographs at the V&A, and Jennifer Scott, Curator of Paintings at The Royal Collection. The event will be chaired by Sir John Tusa, broadcaster and current chairman of University of the Arts London.

Adult: £15, IWM Friends and Concessions: £12 Curator talk: Cecil Beaton, Vogue and Wartime Fashion 24 November 2012, 2pm Hilary Roberts, curator of Shaped

by War and Josephine Ross, author of Beaton in Vogue, explore Cecil Beaton’s work as a photographer for Vogue magazine and how his unique style evolved to reflect ‘The New Spirit’ of wartime fashion.

Make do and Mend Quilt Weekends in December 2012, 11am to 1pm and 2pm to 4pm Gather around the wireless and help us create a ‘Make Do and Mend’ quilt in this Christmas communal art activity. Suitable for families.

Radio Days 27 to 31 December 2012, 2pm to 4pm Listen to a 1940s programme of light entertainment, drama and song from the radio broadcasting service located in the heart of blitzed Lambeth.

IWM London will close for six months on 2 January 2013

CHURCHILL WAR ROOMS Clive Steps, King Charles Street London SW1A 2AQ 020 7930 6961 Open daily (except 24, 25, 26 December) 9.30am to 6pm Admission: IWM Friends: free, Adult: £15.95, Over 60: £12.80, Children under 16: free EXHIBITIONS Undercover – Life in Churchill’s Bunker Until 31 December 2013 First-hand accounts of those who worked in the Cabinet War Rooms during the Second World War. EVENTS Churchill Lecture Series 2013 Tickets will be on sale shortly at www.iwm.org.uk Wings: A Century of Aerial Warfare 5 March 2013, 7pm Historian and author Patrick Bishop tells the story of the evolution of aerial warfare, from the rickety contraptions that fluttered over the Western Front to the high-tech fast jets and drones operating in Afghanistan today.

The Roar of the Lion: The Making of Churchill’s World War Speeches 23 April 2013, 7pm Drawing on contemporary diary and survey evidence, author and historian Richard Toye shows that Churchill’s speeches were much more controversial, and much more criticised, than popular myth suggests.

HMS BELFAST Morgan’s Lane, Tooley Street, London SE1 2JH 020 7940 6300 Open daily (except 24, 25, 26 December) 10am to 6pm (1 March to 31 October), 10am to 5pm (1 November to 28 February) Admission: IWM Friends: free, Adult: £13.50, Over 60: £10.80, Children under 16: free EXHIBITIONS Gun Turret Experience Immerse yourself in the new Gun Turret Experience, a chance to see what fighting at sea would have really been like.

The Operations Room The Operations Room’s rotating radar screens have been recreated for the first time since the ship was operational, giving a sense of the movement and urgency of the room.

EVENTS Slang at Sea 24 and 25 November 2012 Free, drop in event 11am to 12.30pm and 2pm to 4pm A family event looking at navy slang and the origin of popular phrases that link to life at sea.

HMS Belfast’s 75th Anniversary 17 March 2013 Celebrate HMS Belfast’s 75th anniversary and meet some of the veterans who served on board.

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DUXFORD Cambridgeshire, CB2 4QR 01223 835 000 Open daily (except 24, 25, 26 December) 10am to 6pm Admission: IWM Friends: free, Adult: £16.50, Over 60: £13.20, Children under 16: free Tickets for the events listed below can be purchased online at www.iwm.org.uk or by calling the box office on 01223 499 353 EVENTS The First World War Uncovered 24 November 2012 10.30am-4.30pm Historical interpreter Richard Knight looks at the history of the machine gun in the First World War, while battlefield archaeologists Alistair Fraser and Martin Brown will describe how they investigate the identities of unknown fallen soldiers.

Tickets: Adult: £21.50, Senior: £16.40, Student: £13.20, Unemployed (with ES40): £13.20, Disabled Visitor: £9.90, IWM Friend: £9.90

NORTH The Quays, Trafford Wharf Road, Trafford Park, Manchester M17 1TZ 0161 836 4000 Open daily (except 24, 25, 26 December), 10am to 6pm (1 March to 31 October), 10am to 5pm (1 November to 28 February) To book tickets for family events please contact learningnorth@iwm.org.uk or 0161 836 4000 Admission free EXHIBITIONS 10@10: A decade of surprising stories 23 June 2012 to 3 March 2013 Commemorating IWM North’s tenth birthday in 2012, this small, powerful display will reveal ten of the most remarkable tales the museum has uncovered in its first decade, while exploring the history of war and conflict from 1914 to the present day.

Saving Lives: Frontline medicine in a century of conflict Until 1 September 2013 A major new exhibition exploring the difference between life and death on the front line.

Remembering 9/11 Until September 2013 A display commemorating the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

The Falklands Until July 2014 Marking the thirtieth anniversary of the Falklands War, this new outdoor photographic display takes a unique look at the heroes, casualties, dangers and challenges of the conflict.

EVENTS A Closer Look: War Shapes Medicine Various dates November 2012 to March 2013 – please visit website for further details.

A guided tour looking at the stories of people who saved lives and improved medical care during the First and Second World Wars.

What A Performance 1 December 2012, 11.15am, 12.15pm, 1.15pm, 2.15pm See one of our speciallycommissioned, family-friendly performances dramatising stories of wartime adventure themed on the subject of frontline medicine.

A Closer Look: Manchester Blitz 3-7, (9&16*) ,17-21, 31 December 2012, 2.15pm A 20 minute guided tour exploring the Blitz on Britain. See artefacts from the Second World War, including a Dennis fire-fighting trailer pump from Oldham, a Fire Watcher’s shelter and a barrage balloon. *Extended sessions on 9 and 16 December 2012 will include an opportunity to handle Second World War artefacts.

A Closer Look: Christmas Truce 30 December 2012, 2.15pm A 20 minute guided tour exploring the Christmas Truce, when troops on both sides ended hostilities at Christmas on the Western Front in 1914.

Holocaust Memorial Day concert 27 January 2013 Join us to mark Holocaust Memorial Day with a special performance by students of the Royal Northern College of Music.

A Closer Look: Holocaust Memorial Day 28 January to 1 February 2013 Learn more about the personal stories behind some of the artefacts in our collection, including a suitcase belonging to the parents of Eva Wohl, who was sent on the Kindertransport to Britain from Nazi Germany to escape persecution.

A Closer Look: International Women’s Day 4 to 8 March 2013 20 minute tours focusing on the roles of women in wartime, including Major Margaret Barclay-Cooke who was a nursing officer in the Falklands War and features in the Saving Lives exhibition.

Exhibitions around the UK featuring loans from IWM’s collections IWM AROUND THE UK

St Barbe Museum and Art Gallery Worcester City Art Gallery & New Street, Lymington, Hampshire Museum SO41 9BH Foregate Street, Worcester WR1 1DT www.stbarbe-museum.org.uk 01905 25371 01590 676 969 Laura Knight: In the Open Air Randolph Schwabe – A Life in Art Unitl10 February 2013 24 November 2012 – 16 February An exhibition of Dame Laura 2013 Knight’s outdoor paintings during A retrospective of the work of her long and distinguished career, Randolph Schwabe, who was including the devastated employed as an Official War Artist in townscape that formed the both world wars. backdrop of her famous depiction on the Nuremberg War Trials.

Tate Britain Millbank, London SW1P 4RG www.tate.org.uk 020 7887 8888 Schwitters and Britain 28 January – 12 May 2013 A major exhibition focusing on the artist Kurt Schwitters’s late work, from his arrival in Britain as a refugee in 1940, after he was forced to flee Germany when his work was condemned as ‘degenerate’ by the Nazi government, until his death in Cumbria in 1948.

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PHOTO ESSAY

Sergeant Alison Baskerville describes the experience of photographing the military participation in both the Olympic and Paralympic games.

The Paralympic games

In August of this year I was mobilised by the Media Operations Group (V) to photograph the military participation in both the Olympic and Paralympic games.

There was limited access to the sites as the MOD had not been accredited to take images of the soldiers by the London Olympic Organising Committee. We therefore had to convince individuals that it was important for us to record the role of soldiers in the Olympics and Paralympics as this would more than likely never happen again.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have created a greater number of injured service personnel with life-changing injuries. After undergoing a programme of rehabilitation, some of them have become our country’s top Paralympians.

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The two photographs at the top of the page show Lance Corporal Netra Rana from 1 Royal Gurkha Rifles (RGR) whose lower left leg was amputated after being injured by an IED on patrol in Afghanistan in January 2008.

The other photographs feature former Royal Artillery Gunner Sam Bowen, whose right leg was paralysed from the knee down after a mortar blast in Al-Amarah in 2006.

Both took part in the seated volleyball event, a sport which they were introduced to through the Battle Back programme – a military initiative which uses sport to help seriously injured service personnel gain confidence and independence. After watching some of the matches, it is apparent that taking part in the Paralympics has made a very positive contribution to the lives of these young men and women.

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IWM NEWS

Transforming IWM London As you will have read on page 21, the removal of exhibits from IWM London has begun and our galleries on the lower ground floor have now closed. This marks the start of IWM London’s transformation, during which time it will close from 2 January 2013 for six months to enable us to deliver the most disruptive construction works safely and securely.

This is the first phase of a masterplan which will see IWM London remodelled to create a new atrium, new shops, a café opening directly onto the Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park and new First World War Galleries. The transformation will greatly improve visitors’ experience at IWM London – it will be easier to navigate, with improved orientation as well as new lifts and stairs to aid better circulation.

The new atrium will lie at the heart of the museum, and will stretch over six floors with objects and exhibits displayed across rising terraces and balconies. The galleries will reflect the depth and breadth of our collection; large objects – many not previously seen – will be displayed directly alongside film, photography and artworks. The stories told will reflect the history of modern warfare from the First and Second World Wars through to the current conflict in Afghanistan. A new gallery and exhibition space at the top of the museum will also be created, telling more of the stories of contemporary conflicts.

34 n Despatches Winter 2012

As you know, one of most significant aspects of this development will be the new First World War Galleries, which will open in 2014. They will be a third bigger than the previous galleries and will enable us to display much more of our collections and tell the stories of those who lived and fought during the Great War, both in the front line and on the home front. Split into four chapters – How did the war start?, Why did the war go on?, How was the war won?, What happened next? – they will draw upon the latest historical analysis of the causes, course and consequences of the war, a

turning point in world history which cost the lives of over 16 million people across the globe.

During this temporary closure period our research facilities will be relocated to the All Saints building (a five minute walk from IWM London).

The re-opening of IWM London in July 2013 will coincide with the launch of a major new family exhibition Horrible Histories®: Spies.

Based on the popular children’s book and television series, visitors will be shown the world of Second World War spy-craft.

From autumn 2013 there will be a new programme of art and photography displays and many of the large objects will make their return journeys to take up residence within the Central Hall, alongside a number of new large objects not previously seen.

Some areas of the museum will still be under construction – whilst visiting in this time may be subject to some disruption, you will have a unique opportunity to see history in the making as we create a transformed museum space.

and Oasis Academy Johanna, who are taught about IWM London and journalism skills, so they can report on the transformation of the museum.

Jacob and Chelsea’s exclusive interview with the Prime Minister was filmed by BBC’s Newsround and screened later that evening. Their photographs also appeared in the Daily Telegraph, Daily

Express and the Daily Mail.

After their interview, Jacob and Chelsea rejoined their classmates Millie, Surela and Adam to be photographed with the Prime Minister in front of IWM’s First World War Sopwith Camel aeroplane. He told them that he had visited the museum several times with his children and believes in the importance of IWM’s remit.

Young reporters meet Prime Minister Five Young Reporters from Archbishop Sumner School in Lambeth met the Prime Minister David Cameron after his visit to IWM London on 11 October.

The Prime Minister visited the museum to announce plans for the First World War Centenary, including funding of £5 million towards the new First World War Galleries at IWM London.

After the announcement, David Cameron met twoYear 5 students, Jacob and Chelsea, participants in IWM London’s Young Reporters scheme. The initiative involves young people from two local primary schools, Archbishop Sumner

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IWM NEWS New pavilion for HMS Belfast

On the shore side of HMS Belfast, the development of the Quayside Pavilion, which received a £40,000 grant from IWM Friends, is underway. It will offer an exciting new retail space, a ground floor coffee bar ideal for family visitors and a rooftop bar, providing visitors

with spectacular views of HMS Belfast and nearby London landmarks, including Tower Bridge, the Tower of London and City Hall. The development will additionally feature a new entrance, improving the access for groups, schools, corporate clients and service deliveries.

IWM Patrons

The Quayside Pavilion visitor entrance is scheduled for completion in December 2012 while the rooftop bar is scheduled for completion by Easter 2013. The Quayside Pavilion is designed by CPMG Architects, who also designed The Lord Ashcroft Gallery at IWM London.

HMS Belfast’s Conservation Volunteers The Conservation Volunteer programme has been in operation on HMS Belfast since 2007. The team, comprising 35 volunteers, has restored several fittings and compartments. These include two anti-aircraft gun mounts, a four-inch gun mount, a fourinch director and three salvage pumps, all fitted on the upper decks. The Admiral’s Bridge and Compass Platform have been restored to their 1959 configuration, guided by drawings and photographs from this era.

During the next phase of restoration the team will work on the boat crane, a four-inch

gun mount and its associated director. During the winter, restoration will be carried out in the radio rooms located in the forward superstructure.

Eight volunteers from HMS Belfast’s Conservation team.

IWM’s new Patrons scheme was launched at a reception prior to the private view of Cecil Beaton: Theatre of War on 5 September.

Patrons will enjoy an especially close relationship with IWM and will receive special privileges, including invitations to private views and a series of behindthe-scenes events where they can meet IWM specialists and gain a closer insight into IWM’s collections. Patrons will also receive an acknowledgement in Despatches and in IWM’s Annual Review.

There are three levels of patronage – Endeavour, Honour and Valour. In addition to private views and special events, Honour and Valour Patrons will be able to enjoy a bespoke tour of IWM’s collections and attend events hosted by IWM Directors and Trustees.

If you would like further information on becoming a Patron please visit www.iwm.org.uk/corporate/ support-us or contact Victoria Thompson, Head of IWM Friends on 020 7416 5372; Georgiana Bristol, Development Manager on 020 7091 3049; or email us at patrons@iwm.org.uk.

Lieutenant Commander Paul Fletcher, a Life Member of IWM Friends since 2003, joined as our first IWM Patron in September. We now have five Patrons, who are all listed below.

IWM Patrons Lieutenant Commander Paul Fletcher The Civil Service Club David Cannon Mark and Susan Bradley

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Jonathan Lewis’ Our Boys takes place in a military hospital among seriously wounded British soldiers.

The theatre of war One of the running jokes in Peter Nichols’ 1977 play Privates on Parade – which will be revived in London in December, starring Simon Russell Beale – is that the military and theatrical instincts are often contradictory.

Drawing on his own experiences in a Combined Services Entertainment troupe in Singapore and Malaysia in the late 1940s – the successor to the Entertainments National Service Association, lampooned in the long-running television comedy It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum – Nichols entertainingly presents a group of soldiers whose various reasons for being wary of army life – conscientious objection, homosexuality, medical exemptions – have been set aside for the unexpected possibility of singing and dancing on stage every night.

Paradoxically, though, war and theatre, while temperamentally opposed, are linguistically yoked together. The popular term ‘theatre of war’ – to denote the broad outlines of an area under military attack or defence, within which there will be smaller ‘theatres of operation’ – was formalised by the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz in his nineteenth century work On War and has subsequently provided a useful metaphor, headline or title

The journalist, author and broadcaster Mark Lawson examines the relationship between war and theatre. for authors writing about plays that have conflict as their subject.

There are three major obstacles to putting the theatre of war into theatre. The biggest is that to portray conflict convincingly requires large numbers of troops and explosions. Few playhouses, though, have the budgets to achieve credible battle scenes, which is why the most convincing pictures of conflict tend to have been achieved on screen and by the deeppocketed Steven Spielberg, as in the film Saving Private Ryan and the television series Band of Brothers.

A second difficulty is that – in order to achieve significant commercial success – a play needs to draw in a large and socially diverse audience but war is a divisive subject, with the risk of potential ticket-buyers finding a play either too jingoistic or overly patriotic, according to ideological tendency. ‹ Winter 2012 Despatches n 37

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Fiona Shaw in the National Theatre’s 2009 revival of Bertold Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children.

And, thirdly, it can be argued that the best war play – Shakespeare’s Henry V – was written in 1599, with most of the close runners-up to be found in the eight-play cycle from Richard II to Richard III, which, since the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) staged them in consecutive order in the 1960s, have become known as the Wars of the Roses cycle. Another great advantage of Shakespeare is that the war plays are open to various interpretations. With different emphases of casting and delivery, Henry V can be played as a patriotic rabble-rouser – as it was in Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film, which was dedicated to Britain’s Second World War troops – or as a critique of jingoism, which was the case in the mid-1980s RSC production with Kenneth Branagh just after the Falklands War. Because dramatists and actors tend politically towards the left, it is hard to imagine a theatre now staging a play in support of a war; so the two most frequently revived conflict zone scripts from the theatrical canon are both anti-war pieces based in a particular battle-zone but open to metaphorical connections with more contemporary events. They are RC Sheriff’s Journey’s End (1928), set in the trenches of the First World War, and Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children (1939), which takes place during the Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century.

As can be seen from the dates in which the scripts were premiered, both Sheriff and Brecht, though depicting earlier national stand-offs, were motivated by fear of a future conflict, a concern justified by the Second World War. Both plays dramatise the human consequences of military action, with Sheriff focusing on young soldiers treated as cannon-fodder by their superiors and Brecht concentrating on a mother who loses all her sons to the army. And because the figures of the sacrificed young and the mourning parent recur in all conflicts, both dramas have been effectively revived during later times of military action. A David Grindley revival of Journey’s End ran lengthily in the London West End and on Broadway during the

‹

38 n Despatches Winter 2012

Bottom: Belinda Langin the Letter of Last Resort by David Greig, staged at this year’s Edinburgh Festival.

Iraq war, while a 2009 National Theatre revival of Mother Courage, led by Fiona Shaw, was one of a succession of classical revivals at the National Theatre during that time that were inflected to criticise the Bush-Blair foreign policy.

Both Sheriff and Brecht also cannily avoided the complications of putting armies on stage by choosing locations – in the former case a trench, in the latter various camps – away from the fighting.

More recent authors of war plays have sensibly followed this example. Tony Marchant’s Welcome Home (1983) features soldiers, with various psychological and physical scars, back in Britain after the Falklands War, while two of the best American pieces about the Vietnam War – David Rabe’s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971) and Streamers (1975) – deliberately show soldiers being trained for battle. In the same way, Roy Williams’ Iraq War drama Days of Significance (2008) consists of three acts, of which only a brief middle sequence takes place actually in the Middle East.

Two modern examples of the genre – both running in London at the time of writing – also focus on the aftermath of battle. In Sandi Toksvig’s Bully Boy (St James Theatre), a senior military police officer interrogates a young private about an alleged war crime against civilians during one of the twenty-first century’s US-UK invasions. And Jonathan Lewis’ Our Boys (Duchess Theatre) takes place in a military hospital in London among seriously wounded British soldiers.

Intriguingly, both plays, though their productions at this time reflect a decade of the most sustained and life-costly UK action overseas since the Second World War, have links with previous conflicts. Toksvig’s military policeman fought in the Falklands –

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adding an undercurrent of suggestion that Bush and Blair were seeking to ape the ‘war dividend’ that Thatcher gained by tackling Argentina – while Lewis’ play was first staged in 1993, after the First Gulf War. The plays by Toksvig, Lewis, Marchant and Williams are – in common with most such contemporary dramas – written by people whose involvement in the wars in question was as a protesting voter. As a result, one of the most powerful aspects of the one-man show A Soldier’s Song, a hit at the Edinburgh Festival this year, was that the writer-performer had personal experience of fighting: Ken Lukowiak adapated it from his memoir of the First Gulf War. Otherwise, birth-date and artistic temperament mean it’s likely that most modern war playwrights will be writing from the outside, although this was not the case in the immediate postSecond World War generation. Privates on Parade has the distinction of belonging to a small but fascinating set of military scripts written by British men who were too young to serve in the Second World War but old enough to experience military service; apart from Peter Nichols, two other soldiers of the period turned their experience of the Far East into plays: Willis Hall writing The Long and the Short and the Tall (1959) and Charles Wood creating Jingo: A War Farce (1975).

Another curious sub-genre of war theatre is the number of pieces about a conflict that hasn’t happened yet: nuclear war.

Again, and probably for reasons of the cost of convincingly depicting Armageddon, the most durable of these were screen works: Peter Watkins’ The War Game (1965) – banned by the BBC because it was ‘too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting’ – and Mick Jackson’ and Barry Hines’ Threads (1984).

As a theatrical form, the nuclear war piece may have suffered from the fact that an early example of the genre – Philip Martin’s Thee and Me (1980), set during a nuclear winter in 2040 – became one of the most notorious flops in the National Theatre’s history, laughed out of the repertoire. The RSC had only slightly more success with Edward Bond’s The War Plays (1983-84), set after an atomic conflagration. The problem seemed to be that audiences either didn’t want to imagine such an outcome or found a theatrical imagination of it unconvincing.

The frequent weakness of war theatre is that, with the exception of the 1939-45 morale-raising plays, dramas dealing with conflict are almost by definition anti-war and therefore risk being predictable and one-sided. At the peak of public opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan interventions of the Blair and Bush era, it sometimes seemed that theatre critics were seeing three or four plays a week arguing that these wars were wrong. As this view was now almost an international consensus, audiences were rather in the position of the Pope attending a sermon arguing for the existence of God. Regardless of what our own views might be, it would have been intellectually and theatrically refreshing to encounter a dramatist trying to explain why the politicians had acted as they did. The

MIKE EDDOWES

Joshua Miles and Anthony Andrews in Bully Boy at the St. James Theatre.

closest so far is a scene in David Hare’s semi-documentary play Stuff Happens (2004), in which a journalist figure is given a speech justifying the wars. Interestingly, a tangible chill of resistance descended on the National Theatre audience as the character spoke, which may have frightened off some other writers and directors. But one-sided monologues are for political rallies; theatre at its best presents conflicting voices, which is why it is written in dialogue.

For this reason, one of the best war plays is David Greig’s The Letter of Last Resort, seen this year as part of the Tricycle Theatre’s Cold War season, The Bomb: A Partial History, and then separately at the 2012 Edinburgh Festival. Greig’s play is based on the historical fact that one of the first duties of a new UK prime minister is to write sealed instructions for the commanders of Britain’s fleet of nuclear submarines, which will only be opened in the event that the vessels are led by the absence of various external signals (one of these being The Archers on Radio 4) to assume that the nation has been destroyed by nuclear attack. A PM must decide whether to instruct the submarine to retaliate or to seek safe haven with a surviving ally.

Beginning with both his fictional prime minister (a former CND campaigner) and the likely majority of the audience completely opposed to the concept of nuclear weapons, Greig lets the other character – a senior civil servant, reminiscent of Sir Humphrey in Yes Minister – subtly set out the cases for deterrence and the existence of this apocalyptically hypothetical letter, in which the pacifist politician ends up conceding that she has no option except to write the opposite of her original beliefs.

In common with Henry V, The Letter of Last Resort has the ability to make both the war-like and the anti-war question their positions. For a war to occur, there have to be two opposing sides and these factions should be represented in the best war plays as well.

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THE STORY BEHIND THE PICTURE

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The first casualty of war is truth To coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Battle of El Alamein, Hilary Roberts, Head Curator of IWM’s Photograph Archive, tells the story behind one of the campaign’s most well-known images.

Before the Second World War, Len Chetwyn worked as a press photographer for the Keystone Press Agency.

Following the outbreak of the Second World War, he joined the Army where he served initially with the Royal Artillery. However, his experience as a press photographer enabled him to transfer to the new Army Film and Photographic Unit (AFPU), shortly after its formation in October 1941. After completing the required Army training course in film and photography at Pinewood film studios in Buckinghamshire, Chetwyn was posted to North Africa as an official photographer with the rank of sergeant. On 1 April 1942, he joined No. 1 Section, Middle East, AFPU then operating out of British military headquarters in Cairo under the command of Major David MacDonald. Throughout 1942 Sergeant Chetwyn covered the Desert Campaign in North Africa. His experience with Keystone ensured that he quickly became one of the unit’s leading stills photographers, although his expertise was also applied to cine film.

The AFPU was created to remedy deficiencies in the supply of professional quality film and photographic coverage of the British Army to the international media in wartime. For most of 1942 No 1 Section AFPU was responsible for generating film, photography and the management of war correspondents in theatre. AFPU personnel operated in small teams comprising a stills photographer, a film cameraman and a dedicated driver. Once tasked by their commanding officers, they were expected to operate independently and be self-sufficient in the fulfilment of their assignments in the warzone.

Despite the formation of the AFPU, the War Office and the Ministry of Information remained concerned about the lack of good combat images showing British infantry in action in all theatres of deployment.

Wartime events had resulted in a glut of imagery focusing on training and supply but there was a dearth

of ‘exciting’ imagery of actual combat. In October 1942, at a meeting of the Army Council in London, the War Office Directorate of the Public Relations Department noted that ‘much of the effective photography emanating from Russian and German sources was due to skilful faking; although it was undesirable to proceed to the lengths the Germans had gone in this respect, it might be that our practice in the past has been too rigid, and that realistic representation of the Army’s operational activities called for some relaxation in this respect.’ The outcome was War Office Assignment 907, a shortlived experiment to produce well-composed ‘representative’ photographs and film footage of front line combat in North Africa.

Under the terms of WO 907, and despite the deep reservations of senior AFPU commanders, Chetwyn formed and led an AFPU combat camera team nicknamed ‘Chet’s Circus’. The ‘Circus’ comprised two photographers (Chetwyn and Sergeant Jimmy Mapham, formerly of the Leicester Mercury) and two film cameramen (Sergeant John Herbert, formerly of Kodak, and Sergeant Chris Windows, formerly of Paramount). During the Battle of El Alamein ‘Chet’s Circus’ produced some of the most memorable images of the Desert Campaign. However, many of these were staged with troops re-enacting battle scenes augmented by the detonation of carefullyarranged thunderflashes and smoke grenades. This photograph of British infantry advancing through the dust and smoke of the battle taken on 24 October 1942 was one such image, the troops re-staging the battle after it had taken place.

A lot of the photographs appeared artificial and unconvincing, while the rest of the AFPU felt that the images undermined the unit’s integrity and achievements. The assignment was abandoned in November 1942 and ‘Chet’s Circus’ disbanded.

Chetwyn continued to serve as an Army photographer in the Middle East. In June 1943, he received his commission and, now a lieutenant, covered the Sicily landings and the Italian Campaign.

On 24 August 1944, he was mentioned in despatches.

After the war, Chetwyn returned to press photography working for local newspapers such as the Yorkshire Post. He died aged 71 in Winchester, Hampshire in 1980.

Winter 2012 Despatches n 41

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BOOKS

IWM PROC 427

The power of words Nigel Steel, IWM’s Principal Historian, takes a closer look at the proclamation posters used in both World Wars.

In the twenty-first century we live in an ephemeral world. At the push of a button, everything comes – then goes, leaving little behind. The development of the Internet has upped the pace of life. Few can escape it, no one is beyond reach.

The contrast with the period of the two great wars of the last century could not be starker. Despite the popularity of films and the birth of radio, for the first fifty years of the twentieth century communication was still largely through the written or printed word.

The number of letters people wrote is almost impossible to comprehend today; they read books in order to learn and be entertained, and it was generally a more literate era. Society prized and understood sophisticated messages delivered through pithy slogans and smart art. This was the heyday of the poster and these striking combinations of words and images stayed on billboards long enough to become one of life’s fixtures.

In the years 1914-1918 and 1939-1945, government, local authorities and other organisations across the United Kingdom used posters and proclamations on an unprecedented scale to drive home their urgent messages to the people.

Exhortations of moral duty, calls to action, information and advice, statements of solidarity and mutual resolve: time and again these showed the power of words to motivate and direct a nation in time of war.

The country was fortunate that in both world wars it was able to draw on the skill and experience of a wellestablished advertising industry. Practitioners used to promoting their products in a competitive market now turned their talents to persuading people to act as the state considered necessary to win a war. They sold a cherished way of life based on the belief that, to endure, the nation needed everyone to act together; that strength would come only through the exercise of 42 n Despatches Winter 2012

National Service Wants You! HMSO. Immediately following the declaration of war on 3 September 1939, the British government introduced a programme of National Service.

shared values and suffering; and that it was unpatriotic not to accept this and to behave contrary to the common interest.

Only days after the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 the first call was issued for men to enlist.

Within a fortnight the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee had been established to co-ordinate mass recruitment across the country. Over the course of the next eighteen months, the PRC produced some of the most famous posters of the war. Beginning with quite plain letterpress statements, slowly the PRC developed an irresistibly powerful style that combined high moral values with sharp graphic design.

The poster-driven recruiting campaigns of 19141918 left a mixed legacy. They showed that incisive messages could successfully reach a wide public if imaginatively and carefully designed. But, as the

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IWM PROC 019

BOOKS

Victory is in the Kitchen, Scottish War Savings Committee, 1917. As the First World War continued it became increasingly important to maintain the commitment of the home front to the war effort.

human cost of the war became more keenly felt, the public also began to resent the hand of government that had reached out to exact such a high price from them. The British people became wary of overt, stateinspired propaganda.

At the start of the Second World War the newly formed Ministry of Information immediately launched a series of rather patronising letterpress posters to steady the nation. Ironically including the now ubiquitous ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’, the campaign failed and the posters disappeared from sight. The MOI was forced to reassess and look again at the combination of pithy messages and attractive graphics that had worked so well between 1914 and 1916.

From 1940 onwards a new style of poster began to appear. The slogans were cleverer and the images more modern, created by young, avant-garde artists.

The posters were peppered with humour, using cartoon images and introducing recognisable characters. They rapidly caught the public’s imagination and once again, in a distinctive, British way, patriotic propaganda had found its voice.

Viewed from the perspective of the twenty-first century with its graphics rich, all-is-possible media, and more than seventy-five years after these posters were issued, many look strange and old-fashioned.

At the time, they were at the cutting edge of public communication. Yet now, imbued with their phlegmatic tone of ‘Britain can take it’ and ‘Business as usual’, they are the voice of a distant past. Lifted outside the historical context that explains them, their messages can appear stilted, even wryly amusing.

Proclamation posters are not about choice – this product or that one, the red or the blue, the sweet or the sour. They are about telling you what to do.

Sometimes the message is shockingly direct. On other occasions it is more subtle, urging people to do the right thing, as if they had a choice. But really the only course is clear. The question remains simply when to act.

Yet they are also very British directives. In the United Kingdom, people generally do not like being told what to do by the state. They retain the right to refuse, unless in so doing they feel they are letting the side down. In many of these posters it is very clear that people are being placed under a moral obligation, not a legal one. The posters urge you to do it because it is the right thing to do, but they also want you to do it anyway. It is all for the common good.

The posters and proclamations of the two world wars remain dynamic and powerful reminders of the moral pressures under which the British people lived for ten out of the first forty-five years of the twentieth century. Some make you smile, others shock with the directness of their appeal. But every one makes you stop and think, which is what they were designed to do. After so many years, it is very impressive that they still work.

Fit Men Wanted: Original Posters from the Home Front with a foreword by Nigel Steel, published by Thames and Hudson in association with IWM, is available at IWM shops and online at www.iwmshop.org.uk priced £18.95. IWM Friends receive a 10% discount.

Winter 2012 Despatches n 43

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BOOKS

Many of the featured books are available in IWM shops and online at www.iwmshop.org.uk where Friends receive a 10% discount

Persuasive beauty amidst the horror Cecil Beaton: Theatre of War Edited by Hilary Roberts Published by Jonathan Cape Between 1939 and 1945, Cecil Beaton, dandy, narcissist, stylist, a lover of glamour, the theatre, the world of artifice and style, photographed the Second World War, commissioned by the Ministry of Information; he had lobbied hard to get the job and succeeded through the patronage of Kenneth Clark. He travelled much of the world: from the Blitz and the Home Front in London and the shipyards of the North East, to North Africa, the Western Desert, Iraq, Syria, Transjordan, Palestine and finally India, Burma and China. His stamina and physical resources surprised even himself, and the results, encapsulated in some 7,000 negatives and prints from the period in IWM’s collections, form the basis of this enthralling and absorbing book, published on the occasion of the first substantial exhibition of Beaton as a war photographer.

Beautifully produced, and perhaps appropriately printed and bound in China, the images are arranged to match his journey through the war years, illuminated by Beaton’s own commentary culled from his vivid diaries, intertwining visual observation with his own very human emotions.

The whole is rounded off by an unusually detailed chronology by Hilary Roberts. This puts Beaton into the context not only of historical events but specifically the journalism, arts, and contemporary (including technical advances) and war photography of the time: an exceptional mini-history. Some of his correspondence is reproduced, as well as magazine covers and newspaper stories illustrated by his photographs. Life magazine was of crucial importance for helping to persuade America of the importance of Britain’s case: Beaton’s romantic and dignified cover photograph of Queen Elizabeth (1 January 1940) was followed, just a few months later by the image of Eileen Dunne aged three, injured by German shrapnel, sitting bolt upright in her hospital bed, apprehensively clutching a doll almost bigger than herself, her head swathed in bandages; Eileen was an effective cover girl for both Life magazine (in September 1940) and the Illustrated London News. The young Princess Elizabeth in uniform, also part of the war effort, graced the cover of Life in February 1943.

The poignant introduction is in Beaton’s own words, an 44 n Despatches Winter 2012

account of a visit to IWM to see his collection in 1974.

He was astounded at the amount of work he had accomplished, and indeed it was more than any other war photographer, and marvelled that he had accomplished it all with one battered Rolleiflex, with neither shade, lens nor light meter.

Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) was born in Hampstead, into a prosperous family, his father a timber merchant, and he was obsessed by glamour at an impossibly early age, collecting postcards of the stars and fascinated by the theatre; by the late 1920s, under contract to Vogue, he was on his way to being one of the most noted celebrity photographers. Perhaps even now he is best known for the designs for Gigi (1957) and My Fair Lady (1963), but it was in wartime that he first designed for film, notably Kipps, Major Barbara and The Young Mr Pitt.

It is this passion for the subtly dramatic that infuses the wartime photographs. Practically every image is artfully composed, and the curious result is that the photographs are like stage or film sets, every participant good looking, often young; the shipyard workers are suitably heroic; both the humble and the grand Beaton found in India suitably picturesque; landscapes both desolate and magnificent; ruins romantic; crowd scenes epic; pilots straight out of Noel Coward or Terence Rattigan. He was an exceptionally effective propagandist, and whilst in his books and writing well aware of the horrors of war, he could not help finding persuasive beauty.

This publication is ample testament to an outstanding achievement.

Marina Vaizey ISBN 9780224096300 Hardback: £35 Special edition: £100 Cecil Beaton: Theatre of War is at IWM London until 1 January 2013. Join the Friends and see it free.

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BOOKS

Also recommended

D-Day to Victory: The Diaries of a British Tank Commander The diaries of Sgt Trevor Greenwood, edited by S V Partington Published by Simon & Schuster in association with IWM ‘Yesterday I had grave doubts as to whether this page would ever be written,’ wrote Sergeant Greenwood as he sat by his tank on 26 June 1944 on a Normandy battlefield. How fortunate we are that he wrote not just this page but hundreds of them from D-Day to 17 April 1945.

Greenwood was conscripted into the Army in 1940 and joined the 9th Battalion Royal Tank Regiment. His diary, kept in defiance of regulations, is a field service record written with a breathless immediacy.

Greenwood was no natural soldier.

He freely writes of his feelings as he went into battle on 10 July: ‘Once again that terrible fear’; he recoils at the destruction of houses and farms as the allies fight their way towards Germany. And he longs to be home and to be freed from the moral dilemmas that are inevitable in war.

The humanity of Greenwood was heightened by his traumatic experiences. Far from being desensitised by war, the more he saw the more his heart went out to those who suffered around him. After one battle the tanks were rescuing exhausted infantry, and Greenwood writes ‘Pity we couldn’t have saved more of them: a grand lot of lads.’

War means seeing friends and colleagues killed and injured at close hand. Greenwood, writing as he does within hours (sometimes minutes) of events, conveys all the emotions of horror and pity as he sees smashed 46 n Despatches Winter 2012

tanks from which no man will return, or provides first aid to one of his crew, badly hurt while in a foxhole under their tank. He took the injured man to a first aid post and, on returning, found that two more of the crew had been hit by sniper fire. The eight pages that Greenwood wrote on that day, as he guarded and attempted to repair his damaged tank, must rank as one of the most heroic and moving diary entries of all time.

Why did Greenwood write the diary?

He knew that he could never show it to anyone in wartime, but then it never reads like a diary to be shared with others. It is more like a man talking to himself and trying to make sense of the horrendous situation around him.

Greenwood never mentioned the diary to his children – it was discovered in his attic after his death.

I doubt that he had any idea that he had written a masterpiece. Perhaps the most plausible explanation is that the act of writing was itself cathartic.

It is clear that Greenwood was a sensitive man who found it easy to empathise with others. However much he saw, however much he experienced, nothing reduced his compassion.

This is a diary that will stand the test of time. Greenwood saw and participated in the most terrible events and he recorded them with a rare immediacy and intensity. D-Day to Victory is a fine book, written by an extraordinary man. The editing is excellent, as is the supplementary material covering abbreviations, technical terms and the organisation of 9 RTR. Richard Freeman ISBN: 9781471110689 Paperback: £8.99 Richard Freeman’s latest book Midway: The Battle that Made the Modern Worldis published as a Kindle book by Endeavour Press Ltd. For his other books, see www.rdfreeman.net

Tracing Your Prisoner of War Ancestor: The First World War

By Sarah Paterson Published by Pen & Sword Books in association with IWM An essential introduction for readers who are keen to get an insight into the experience of a POW or an internee during the First World War, and an invaluable guide for anyone who is trying to trace an ancestor who was captured.

ISBN: 9781848845015 Hardback: £14.99 Love, Tommy

By Andrew Roberts Published by Osprey in association with IWM A poignant collection of letters home from soldiers during a hundred years of British and Commonwealth military history.

ISBN: 9781849087919 Hardback: £20

At War with the Irish Division: The Letters of JHM Staniforth Edited by Richard Grayson Published by Pen & Sword Books in association with IWM A perceptive, graphic and evocative personal record of a soldier’s life in the Great War. ISBN: 9781848846340 Hardback: £25 Forgotten Voices: Desert Victory

By Julian Thompson Published by Ebury Press in association with IWM The story of the Allies' first victory against Hitler's army, told in the voices of the men who were there.

ISBN: 9780091938581 Paperback: £7.99

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IWM SHOP

the family including products Christmasgift ideas forfromallour new Cecil Beaton range.

Available in IWM Shops and online at www.iwmshop.org.uk

Richly-fruited Christmas pudding £11.99

Paper aeroplane kit £8.99

Blimey mug £8.99

Real forget-me-not earrings £19.99

Soir De Paris perfume £22.99

Tommy Gun ginger biscuit drum 200g £4.50

Mailorder 01223 499345 / www.iwmshop.org.uk 48 n Despatches Winter 2012

Cecil Beaton Desk Diary 2013 £13.99 Cecil Beaton Calendar 2013 £9.99

You can now use your 10% discount in the IWM online shop. Register as a customer at www.iwmshop.org.uk then email iwmshop@iwm.org.uk to confirm your membership number. Discounts do not apply to postage and packing.

(C) ANTONIO OLMOS

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AND FINALLY

DESTINY IN THE DESERT Jonathan Dimbleby describes how IWM helped with the research for his latest book, Destiny in the Desert, an account of the Battle of El Alamein My father (the broadcaster Richard Dimbleby) never talked about the Second World War despite having covered many of its theatres of conflict. His broadcast on the liberation of Bergen-Belsen in 1945 was a harrowing account of human suffering, which remains undiminished with the passing of time. It was so graphic and disturbing that the BBC initially refused to broadcast it unless it could be corroborated. My father said that if they did not air his report he would never broadcast again. When I listened to it many years later it struck me that that this broadcast would not ever have been forgotten by anyone who heard it for the first time.

Copies of many of my father’s broadcasts are held in IWM’s collections. To my shame, I had only visited IWM London once before

I began to write my book Destiny in the Desert, an account of the battle of El Alamein. I had assumed that IWM promoted only the extraordinary achievements of battle. However, I am now aware that it shows these achievements in a context which is both measured and balanced. I think of IWM as an important testimony to man’s ability to destroy man as well as achieve victory and endure defeat.

I have always been interested in the Battle of El Alamein. My father was in North Africa for two years covering the conflict but was suddenly withdrawn by the BBC without explanation and became, briefly, a non-BBC person. I was perplexed as to why until I read Corelli Barnett’s book The Desert Generals. My father covered the battle while General Claude Auchinleck

was commander-in-chief. Winston Churchill was frustrated with Auchinleck because he refused to go into battle prematurely, and subsequently removed him in August 1942. GHQ Cairo wanted the BBC to broadcast its perspective on the conflict, which – under censorship and to his frustration – my father did. GHQ also insisted that my father’s reports – which went all round the world – were superior to all other reports. Churchill was at war with Auchinleck. The BBC – assuredly for this reason – withdrew my father at the same time that Auchinleck was sacked.

But the events leading up to the Battle of El Alamein are far more important than one reporter’s fate and have always intrigued me. Why were we there? How important was the Western Desert Campaign? When Profile Books asked ‹ Winter 2012 Despatches n 49

50 n Despatches Winter 2012

Left: General Sir Claude Auchinleck, Commander-inChief, Middle East during June 1941 – August 1942.

Above: Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery, commanding the British Eighth Army in North Africa, in the turret of his Grant command tank at El Alamein, 5 November 1942.

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‹ me if I wanted to write a book to coincide with the 70th anniversary of El Alamein, I had some doubts. I am not a professional historian. So I consulted colleagues like Max Hastings, Andrew Roberts and Antony Beevor, and they were helpful and encouraging. They said I’d be sure to find something fresh to say about the conflict and that I’d enjoy the process.

They were right. There have, of course, been many fine books written on the campaign, but I don’t think that anyone else has placed the conflict in its global context in the way I have sought to achieve. Why was Hitler so distracted by it?

Was it pivotal to the way in which Roosevelt entered the Second World War? I have no doubt that the Desert Campaign was very important in itself and in its implications for the wider war. It was not peripheral but pivotal. Those historians who have argued that the Battle of El Alamein was peripheral fail to appreciate that it was the necessary and inevitable culmination of a conflict which had ramifications far beyond the confines of the battle between Rommel and Montgomery.

For Churchill the Mediterranean and the Middle East were crucial to the British Empire, safeguarding the nation’s vital assets and to sustaining the great imperial outposts in India, Africa, and the Far East.

The British high command were persistently fearful that the Wehrmacht would advance through the Balkans or, later, via the Caucasus, as part of a pincer movement that would strangle Britain’s main artery to the Empire. We now know from the German archives that, had Russia fallen, this would have been Hitler’s priority.

Virtually no-one in Britain doubted the importance of the Empire, though not many had the tenacity and strategic vision displayed by Churchill to counter that threat. To appreciate this is to appreciate the importance of the Desert Campaign and the critical importance of defeating Rommel. This was of far greater importance than the fact that the North African theatre was the only arena in which Britain could confront the Nazi threat on land.

The Battle of El Alamein gave Churchill a great personal and political boost. It also raised British morale – demonstrating beyond doubt that the Germans could be beaten on the battlefield. No less importantly, it is inconceivable that Roosevelt would have fought in North Africa – the ‘true second front’ as Churchill

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described it to Roosevelt – before invading Europe without Britain’s military commitment to that theatre. Churchill was insistent that victory at El Alamein should be achieved before the Anglo-American landings in North Africa, Operation Torch, hoping both for a propaganda coup and to demonstrate that the British Army, after so many defeats, was a force for the Americans to reckon with.

The battle of El Alamein was to enter a hallowed pantheon of historic British victories, a twentieth century version of Blenheim and Trafalgar. In the mythology in which it was soon to be shrouded, the battle also acquired its own Marlborough or Nelson in the person of Bernard Montgomery, who replaced Auchinleck.

Montgomery was in the right place at the right time and had the right resources. But he was not a great general. It was Auchinleck, his predecessor, who stopped Rommel from reaching Cairo – though, shamefully, Montgomery claimed that he was planning to surrender Egypt. ‘The Auk’

deserves much of the credit for creating the conditions for the victory at El Alamein, which Montgomery claimed in advance would be ‘a mathematical certainty.’ Nor was the Eighth Army as demoralised before his arrival as Montgomery (and Churchill) liked to claim.

There was only one way to fight that battle and I suspect that The Auk would have fought it just as well. But that is to second guess history: Montgomery won it and – with his predecessors and the men of the Eighth Army – he deserves his share of the plaudits.

Like so many others, I am grateful for the help I and my researcher Guy Gibbs were given from IWM for Destiny in the Desert.

It is an invaluable resource staffed by talented specialists who gave us great support.

Destiny in the Desert: the road to El Alamein – the battle that turned the tide

by Jonathan Dimbleby, published by Profile Books, is available priced £25.

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